In the latest book BMX freestyle Olympic gold medallist, X-Games legend and world champion LOGAN MARTIN takes us on his inspiring journey to the top of the global podium. In this edited extract he shares the discipline, courage, sacrifices and perils required to be an international extreme sports athlete…
LOGAN’S RUN
Gold Coast’s Logan Martin started freestyle BMX at the age of 12 after following his brother, Nathan, to the Crestmead Skate Park. Spending most of his spare time there, Martin started showing real talent at the age of 15, entering competitions with his parents, Donna and Sean, taking him to the events and buying bikes and parts.
Logan first travelled overseas in 2012, where he won the first international event he entered. Martin won the International Festival of Extreme Sports (FISE) World Series title in both 2015 and 2016, following those titles up by claiming the inaugural BMX Freestyle world title at the UCI Urban World Championships in China in 2017. A stellar 2019 followed, which saw Logan win dual X Games gold, the Urban Games gold, and a World Championship silver behind teammate Brandon Loupos. He also built a BMX ramp in the backyard of his home to prepare for his Olympic run during lockdown.
At the 2020 and 2021 National Championships in Melbourne, Martin won gold, and added a second career rainbow jersey when he took out the 2021 UCI World Championships in France. The culmination of Logan’s career so far was claiming gold at the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games. He still lives on the Gold Coast with his wife, Kimberley, and their two children, Noah and Luna.
CRASH & BURN
There is a comfort in getting uncomfortable. Every day I’m riding on an adrenalin rush and constantly scaring myself – some days more than others, particularly if I’m trying new things or almost crashing. That’s why there’s a sense of pride walking away from each session, because you’ve overcome the fear. The positive endorphins running through your body give you a feeling that is so addictive. You crave it. And that rush comes about only because you’ve pushed yourself out of your comfort zone. And you’ve survived.
The ability to overcome fear has a lot to do with your personality; it’s like you’re constantly having an internal chat with yourself. If I do crash my mindset isn’t, “What if I get hurt again?” Straightaway I’m thinking, “When can I get back into it?” I’m aware of the risks. I know what can go wrong, but I prefer to look at it in a positive light: what can go right. That is a better way to look at life and the precarious situations that I’m constantly confronted with in BMX.
People often ask what I’m thinking about during tricks. Because I’ve been doing this for 17 years – professionally for nine years – I’m a lot more conscious of what’s going on in the trick or in a spin. As soon as I take off from the ramp I can feel if something is about to go wrong, or I can feel if something is about to go right. I know how to control things to a point. If I need to I can correct it in the air, or if I’m going to crash, I can slide out a little bit more smoothly than I would have 10 years ago, because I have more awareness of where I am and how the trick has gone wrong.
When I first learned backflips I would shut my eyes in the middle of the trick, only opening them to see the landing. That was because I was scared to do the trick for a long time but, like a lot of things, the more you do them the more comfortable you become. I’ve found that the more relaxed you are on the bike, the more in control you are of what is happening around you. But sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.
My first competition of 2018 was a small dirt contest over in America at a Supercross event. I lost my bearings on a jump and paid a hefty price, landing face-first on the ramp, which I then slid all the way down. It was a solid crash but I came away relatively unscathed – just a bit of whiplash. Unfortunately, it was a sign of things to come.
When I got home my focus turned to the opening FISE World Series event of the season, which was in a new location: Hiroshima, Japan. I’d been focusing on a couple of new tricks, including a frontflip flair, which had a high degree of difficulty. It involved a frontflip with a 180-degree rotation, landing back on the ramp that you’d taken off from. On this particular day we were in Brisbane at the indoor skatepark RampAttak, and my wife Kim had tagged along. She would often take video of my practice sessions, which I would then post onto social media. There was one rule that I was always reminding her of: if I crashed she was to keep filming and not get scared. I wanted my followers to experience all the ups and downs of my journey. The frontflip flair has quite a unique spin, and if you miss what we call “the pop” it’s hard to speed up the rotation. I missed the pop, got stuck upside down in the frontflip and then landed upside down, mashing my collarbone. It was nasty.
An ambulance was called and the paramedics quickly put me on the green whistle. This is an inhaler with special medication in it that provides rapid pain relief. I had initially been in extreme pain, so the whistle managed to at least make me comfortable for my trip to hospital. Kim was understandably upset but proud that she did her job. “I kept filming,” she said in an attempt to brighten my spirits.
Once I gotto the hospital they took X-rays, which showed a broken collarbone and bruising in the lungs. I was sent home that night, where I started to do my calculations around whether I could recover for the trip to Japan in three weeks’ time.
The only way to accelerate the process was to have surgery, to the tune of $10,000. I had to wait a week for the procedure, which meant I had a two-week recovery period. When I’m in a moment like this, all I can see is my goal – in this case, it was boarding a plane to Japan. I waited until Sunday – the day before I would have to fly out – to test out the shoulder. I took the bandages off, got back on the bike and actually felt okay. However, the reality was I hadn’t done anything for three weeks. My muscles weren’t ready to go, and it was too much of a risk on my body.
This was the second time I’d broken my collarbone, and while my injury list was long, I felt pretty lucky compared to some of my mates. Considering how long I’d been doing this and what I’d achieved, I’d managed to escape any serious injuries that kept me off the bike for long amounts of time. By comparison, plenty of my mates are broken. I’ve dislocated my shoulder six times. The first time I did it I went to hospital and they popped it back in, but after that I learned to do it myself with the help of my mates. One time we were in France and I injured it at a contest on the Sunday, but with the help of Kyle Baldock, we popped it straight back in. I had another event in France the following weekend, so I stayed off the bike until Thursday – and then went out and won the competition.
I suffered a really bad concussion in 2017 at the Nitro World Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. I had just dropped in for my last practice run before the qualifying round, which was only twenty minutes away. I attempted a frontflip barspin no-hander. It went horribly wrong, and I ended up knocking myself out. I don’t remember doing the trick, and barely remember anything from the day itself. I continued to throw up the next day and then travelled home, still very sick. I had a headache for a week. That was certainly a scary one, but it wasn’t my personality to dwell on such things or think about the potential larger consequences.
I’ve also torn ligaments in both of my ankles. I’ve dislocated one pinky finger and busted off the nails on both of them, as well as breaking a bone in my hand. I have a bulging disc in my back, the bottom line being my body never actually feels good. That’s just something you get used to. But I’m the lucky one. There are so many stories about elite riders who have had their careers cut down because of nasty injuries.
RISE & REPEAT
Everything was geared towards two years’ time in Tokyo, although getting there wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought, given the complicated qualification pathway. Only nine riders would be competing, with one of those spots already going to Japan as the host country. Riders would earn points for their countries at UCI-sanctioned events, such as the FISE World Cup stops during the qualifying period that ran from 1 November 2018 to 11 May 2020. The country that scored the most points could send two riders, second to fifth would send one rider each, while the final two spots would go to countries based on individual rider performance at the 2019 World Championships.
It was hard to get your head around, but we were one of the few countries who had an opportunity to win two spots, given Brandon Loupos and I were clearly in the top handful of riders in the world. Although I didn’t exactly perform like that when the X Games made its debut in Australia, which is something I’m still angry about. In a massive boost for extreme sports in this country, the ESPN extravaganza came to Sydney, but unfortunately the weather in October didn’t play its part.
It was a dirt event held at Spotless Stadium (now the Sydney Showground Stadium) in the Olympic Park precinct. Rain and dirt aren’t a good mix, and the whole lead-up was a washout, which meant we barely got half an hour of practice on the course. The organisers had spent a lot of time trying to harden up the jumps, even putting plywood on the floor where there were puddles in between features. It was a mess, and I struggled with the softness of the jumps, which made it hard to get enough speed coming off them. There were three jumps, and I managed to get through the first two tricks. But with the last jump, where I was trying to do a 720 double-barspin – which is a trick I do quite often – I was coming up a bit short each time. I was getting more and more frustrated. I kept repeating the same thing – coming up short and crashing. In hindsight, I should have dialled back the trick a little bit to make it clean, and if I’d done that I probably would have won.
The winner, Polish rider Dawid Godziek, had done a simple trick on his second jump to ensure he got over the third jump, which was a sound plan. I ended up finishing ninth and was pissed afterwards. It had been a golden opportunity… and I’d blown it. But we didn’t have long to stew on it; I was scheduled to defend my world title the following month back in China.
As part of the team’s preparation, Wade asked us if we wanted a change of scenery from the Gold Coast for a training camp, and it was decided a few days down in Melbourne would work wonders. There was a good indoor skatepark called RampFest, and for our sessions we set up a large airbag to soften the landing as we practised some of our bigger tricks. I decided to focus on doing a flip double-whip, which I hadn’t really got the chance to do too often at home because we didn’t have the same quality facility.
On the second day I went back in the morning and practised the trick again. After a couple of good run-throughs I decided to move over to the resi (a foam and plastic safety layer), where the landing wasn’t as soft. I also nailed that, so I kept working my way through the rest of the session, combining various other tricks. Then, half an hour later, I thought I should go back and do one last flip double-whip, just to confirm in my mind that I was on top of it. It turns out I wasn’t.
While I was in the air, my foot hit the wheel as the whip was coming around, which put everything out of control. Then I got my foot stuck in the top of the wheel, which meant when I landed my ankle was effectively pulled apart. The moment I hit the ground I knew I was in serious trouble. As I sat on the ground and started to take my ankle brace off, Kyle and Loupos came over to survey the damage. “Surely it’s not that bad. I bet you wake up tomorrow and it’ll be all good,” Loupos said. “Nah, I’m telling you, it’s seriously messed up.”
We went straight to hospital for X-rays, and while I waited I booked a flight home later in the day. I wanted to get as far away from this place as soon as possible. While the initial report at the hospital was positive, I still couldn’t move my ankle, so I had an MRI scan on the Gold Coast. That scan revealed some spiral fractures in the high ankle, a section known as the syndesmosis, plus there was some ligament damage.
It wasn’t the first time I’d rolled my ankle, and previously I’d taken painkillers, put tape around the ankle really tightly and continued riding. Not this time. The world championships were only a couple of weeks away, but my doctor wasn’t entertaining a quick recovery. “If you make these spiral fractures worse, it’s going to be a lifelong injury. It will become an issue all the time,” he said. That wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was apparent I was going to have to take this one on the chin and sit it out.
I’d managed to bookend the year with bad injuries. Thankfully, in between those tough times, I’d also won my first X Games gold medal. And there was one other good thing to take out of 2018… I was going to be a father. ■
Logan Martin: Journey to Gold by Logan Martin with Scott Gullan (published by Penguin, rrp$34.99) is out now
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