IOC out of touch by 20 years as BMX lands on Olympic landscape

BMX has become a fully-fledged Olympic sport, having made its debut in Beijing. It thus joins synchronised swimming, beach volleyball and modern pentathlon as sports that, to put it politely, divide Olympic-watchers. Or not so much divide, as raise the question: why?

It is the timing of the inclusion of BMX that is most curious, though it highlights just how out of touch the International Olympic Committee is. They are, in fact, so out of touch that you fear real tennis might be the next addition to the programme – if real tennis was deemed to be popular with 'the kids'.

Because it is this notion – that BMX is what the kids are all doing – that prompted its inclusion. This is also what is driving a campaign to have skateboarding added, though that will not happen until at least the 2016 Games.

The IOC is anxious to attract a more youthful audience; they are terrified at being perceived as out-of-touch. Yet the irony is that in their determination to prove how in-touch they are, they have confirmed that they are about as 'down with the kids' as Anne Widdecombe.

It's true that BMX was huge – two decades ago. Chris Hoy and Jamie Staff, gold medallists from Britain's all-conquering track cycling team, were both top BMX-ers in the 1980s, when the scene was thriving. "It was booming," says Staff, "there were tonnes of tracks, especially in inner cities – Slough, Surbiton, Hounslow. It was a huge scene. In the late eighties the nationals at Hounslow would have thousands."

Similarly in Scotland, there were numerous tracks, and a high standard one at Livingston where Hoy practiced weekly – but most began to disappear in the early 1990s, when the BMX boom abruptly ended. "It was very much a sport that depended on volunteers and families," says Staff. "Everyone's purse strings tightened in the early 1990s and it hit BMX hard."

But in addition to that, a new craze was in town – the mountain bike. It was the grown-up version of BMX, and so most of those BMX kids of the 1980s – including Hoy – switched. "BMX just wasn't cool any more," is how Hoy has put it. The mountain bike, meanwhile, and as we know all too well in Scotland, took off. Its progress was initially in fits and starts, but by the early 2000s it was firmly established as the most popular branch of cycling worldwide. And yet in 2003 the IOC took the decision to add BMX.

To be fair, and in a rare example of the IOC moving with the times, mountain biking – at least the cross country discipline – has been in the Games since 1996.

But by the early 2000s it was the downhilling branch of this sport that was booming. Cross country is a wonderful test of endurance, but it isn't a great spectacle; downhill racing, as the thousands who have attended the Fort William Mountain Bike World Cup will attest, is thrilling to watch.

It might not be practical, or possible, to introduce a downhill race, given that these need mountains, and mountains don't always exist near big cities. But there is a sub-division of downhill racing, four-cross, which needs only a small hill. It sees four riders going head-to-head down a short course with bumps and bends; it is exciting, a great spectacle – and it is what 'the kids' are doing, in vast numbers.

These days, a small professional BMX scene exists in the States. Staff raced there in the late 1990s into the early 2000s, but it is about as global as shinty.

The industry has all but collapsed; the numbers taking part are diminishing.

Perhaps its inclusion in the Olympics will lead to a resurgence, which would be welcome in some quarters. After all, Hoy is not alone in calling it "a great sport for kids." But perhaps it won't.

And in any case, if the IOC really wanted to prove that they are in-touch, then why not redress the gender imbalance in the cycling programme?

The inclusion of BMX meant, of course, that two events had to go – the men's kilometre and women's 500m time trials. And that, scandalously, left only one women's sprint event on the programme, as opposed to three for the men.

All things being equal, Victoria Pendleton would have been going for three gold medals here in Beijing – and given her dominance in the women's sprint, she'd have been odds-on to equal Hoy's clean sweep of the sprint titles.

FACT BOX

THE inclusion of BMX as an Olympic sport made the world sit up and realise it had not died out after a 1980s boom.

The sport is based on motocross, riders tackling a 350 metre course with jumps and banked corners. They fly through the air, with eight riders competing in each fast-paced round at the Olympics.

The sport's official history goes back to 1981, when the International BMX Federation was set up.

In January 2003, BMX was made part of the International Cycling Union, and the following June it was decided to include the event in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.