VIDEO: Olympic BMX Cyclist Connor Fields On How He Tries Not To Crash

Avoiding crashes in BMX is incredibly difficult, even for those at the highest level of the sport. Connor Fields, an Olympian for the United States in BMX, believes that trial and error, as well as the use of technology, are critical facets of developing an ability to avoid such crashes.

“That’s the goal anyway, you try not to crash. We’ve ridden so much and part of what drew me to BMX originally was that every course is different, every track is different, every time you race is going to be completely different,” Fields said at a Team USA media summit earlier this summer. “I guess it’s the opposite of track and field or swimming where it’s very consistent it’s always kind of the same, so I’ve ridden so many different jumps and so many different courses over my life that I  have a pretty good ability to look at a course and kind of dissect it and figure out what is going to be the fastest way through a particular section or obstacle, and then we are given time on the course before race day to try things out, so sometimes we’ll use technology such as dark fish where you can try multiple different options through one section and then you can put them up next to each other to compare and see which one is faster, but it is a bit of trial and error and as a young rider when you’re a kid you go through that trial and a lot of error when you’re learning how to judge things and how far maybe to jump or if you should stay on the ground or not, and you take your knocks, you crash a little bit or you make some mistakes, but that’s just kind of part of the process that that we have to go through when we’re learning how to do it.”