Sonoma Valley’s Nikita Ducarroz wins bronze in BMX freestyle at Olympics

Sonoma Valley native Nikita Ducarroz earned a bronze medal in BMX freestyle cycling at the Tokyo Olympics on Saturday night, and the celebrating began on at least three continents.

In Tokyo, where it was Sunday morning, the Olympian soaked in the moment with her coach and with other competitors, with whom she has grown quite close.

“We were all just really happy to be here together,” she said during a news conference after the race. “We’ve been on this journey together for so many years, coming from there being like five of us at an event to now being at the Olympics.”

In Geneva, Switzerland, the athlete’s mother, Nicole Abaté Ducarroz, celebrated with her husband and his Swiss family — whom they hadn’t seen in three years, partly because of the pandemic.

And in Glen Ellen and Sonoma, 5,000 miles away from the action at Ariake Urban Sports Park, dozens of people gathered to honor the native daughter who will bring home a medal from the Olympics’ first-ever BMX freestyle competition.

For a while, all of them had to sweat it out.

After a brilliant first round, Nikita Ducarroz was in second place with a score of 89.20. There would be another round, with riders keeping the better of their two marks. In Round 2, Ducarroz tumbled while landing from a jump on the halfpipe ramp. She had to stick to that 89.20, and several riders followed her in the competition.

One of those women, Charlotte Worthington of Great Britain, turned in the best score of the day, a 97.50. She would be the gold medalist, and she bumped Ducarroz to third place behind American Hannah Roberts (96.10). But Ducarroz would fall no further. Another American, Perris Benegas, came painfully close with a score of 88.50.

So it was Ducarroz who would earn a lifelong memento of sporting excellence.

“It was amazing,” said her aunt, Jules Abaté, who had watched the freestyle finals at Picazo Kitchen & Bar in Sonoma. “They put up a screen and a projector. There were a lot of parents and students from her school there. It was just amazing. I don’t know what else to tell you, honey.”

The scene was said to be just as lively on Riddle Road in Glen Ellen, where neighbors turned Ducarroz’s childhood home into a block party.

Ducarroz, who will turn 25 in a couple weeks, was born in Nice, France, to a Swiss father and an American mother. The family moved to Glen Ellen when she was 3 months old, and she went all through school in Sonoma Valley. But she took vacations to Geneva most summers. Roberts and Benegas, the American BMX freestylists, are two of her best friends, so she decided to compete for Switzerland.

Ducarroz has always been an uncanny athlete.

“I think she could ride a bike almost as soon as she could walk,” Abaté said. “She taught my kids to ride a bike. I found a picture of the kids when they were little, and she’s in the air. She’s jumping off a chair. All the other kids are sitting in the chair, a big, cushiony chair. She’s been getting air since she was maybe 5 years old.”

Ducarroz developed into a budding soccer star as a youth player. But the athletic path wouldn’t be easy for her. The girl developed social anxiety so acute that she could barely push herself to leave the house. Her family home-schooled her, first through an arrangement with Woodland Star Charter School in Sonoma, then with K12 Cava, a virtual academy through which she ultimately received her high school diploma.

Somewhere in that time, Ducarroz began doing tricks on BMX bikes, first on a ramp in her driveway, then on a half-pipe and box jump in backyard in Glen Ellen.

BMX racing has been an Olympic sport since 2008, but this was a first for freestyle. Also known as BMX park, it’s an eye-catching event with riders flipping, twisting and spinning their handlebars on a course that resembles a skate park.

It was biking, Ducarroz has said, that drew her back into the world.

“One-hundred percent,” she told the Sonoma Index-Tribune last November. “I needed that thing that I was so passionate about. For me it was BMX but it could have been anything, to give me a reason to push through the fears of leaving my house.”

She told the Sonoma paper, “I literally had to make my entire day’s goal to get myself to go out of the house and go to the skate park.”

But she did it. Soon Ducarroz was working out at Ramp Rats in Santa Rosa, and later at competitions that rippled out to California, then other parts of the U.S., then Europe.

After medaling, Ducarroz talked about her anxiety during the post-race news conference.

"It’s definitely not away,“ she said. ”It’s very much here. I was panicking today. And it happens every day. But I have to just learn to find tools to manage it, and stay as calm as possible.

“The worst part is the waiting, before the contest. But once we drop in — except for waiting for my score — everything seems to calm down a bit."

She trained for the Olympics in North Carolina. Perhaps the heat and humidity there was good preparation. It was so hot in Tokyo on Saturday that Ducarroz wore a cold vest supplied by a sponsor, Red Bull.

Nicole Ducarroz wasn’t able to speak to her daughter right after the finals. The cyclist was whisked off to mandatory drug testing, then to a news conference for the podium finishers. “But I talked to her coach (Daniel Wedemeijer), and he was crying,” said Nicole, who was planning welcome Nikita in Geneva on Sunday.

Nicole Ducarroz generally travels the world, helping her daughter at events. It’s a bonding exercise, for sure, but the mother also helps to manage Nikita’s anxiety. No visitors were allowed at the Summer Games, though —some watched from a bridge outside the park —because of COVID protocols.

“Her mom goes with her everywhere,” Abaté said. “But this one she had to do without her mom.”

She did all right, it seems.