No medal for Ducarroz on his birthday
When Ducarroz faced the media, she was already smiling again. Of course she was disappointed, but at the same time she is happy for the three medal winners. One aspect she values in her sport is the people. They are like a big family with the aim of pushing BMX freestyle.
Meeting people wasn’t always her thing. Some days she used to not even be able to leave her room. She was plagued by panic attacks that came out of nowhere. “When I was little, I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Ducarroz said in an interview with the Keystone-SDA news agency. Although she still has panic attacks now and then, she has learned how to deal with them. “I have the right people around me who understand me and know what to do. That’s why I’m less stressed.”
Ducarroz didn’t board a plane for a while, but now traveling has become routine for her, even if it’s still hard at times. She only flew to Munich on Tuesday morning, directly from the USA. She has lived in Holly Springs, North Carolina, since January 2020, having previously lived in Glen Ellen, California. In Holly Springs she finds ideal training conditions. The facility is owned by Olympic silver medalist Daniel Dhers.
After the move, Ducarroz trained significantly more. A normal day is full of crowds: In the morning she trains for three to four hours on her bike, after a break she goes to the gym. It was a good thing that she was able to concentrate fully on sport in 2020 due to the corona pandemic. “During a normal season with many competitions, it’s difficult to have a career,” said Ducarroz, whose father is from Geneva and whose mother is American, so she holds both passports.
They converted the progress made in 2020 into excellent results in 2021: they won Olympic bronze, World Cup silver and European Championship gold last year. Why did she actually start for Switzerland if she lives in the USA? One of the reasons was that Sportlande lives a wallflower existence and she wants to make him better known. “It’s a great opportunity to service this side of my family,” says Ducarroz, who regularly visits her grandparents in Geneva during the summer.
She got into BMX after seeing the sport on YouTube. She had never heard of it before, but she loves to ride a bike with her brother. “It looked like fun,” said Ducarroz. So she tried it and couldn’t get rid of it. “There is always a challenge to learn something new.”
At the European Championships in Munich, she was on the right track in the first run before she made a “small mistake” at the end, which resulted in a fall. In the second run she risked everything and fell again early. Has it ever happened to you two falls in a competition? “I don’t think so. But unfortunately that’s the sport.” Ducarroz is already looking ahead again, in November they will win their second World Championship medal in Abu Dhabi. “I’ll take a break now and then I’ll work even harder,” she promises. At first she enjoyed her birthday despite the disappointment.