Olympic hopeful and World Champion BMX rider Shanaze Reade
The phenomenally talented World Champion BMX rider; Shanaze Reade is all set to take gold at the London Olympics in two years time. Over the years, she has been going strong apart from a major hiccup at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Coming from humble cycling beginnings to taking the world by storm, she is now taking one step at a time and slowly advancing in her field. At the 2012 London Games, she is looking to be the first woman athlete to win two gold medals in two different disciplines. She is a future cycling star that has come out of the UK and she will be the one to watch out for in the years to come.
Shanaze Reade is a 21-year-old cycling sensation to emerge from England. She is from Crewe and has won many championships in her racing career. Shanaze started out with a BMX cycle at a young age and slowly moved up the ranks. She won the world junior BMX championship twice as a youngster and then trained extremely hard to become an Olympian at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. She is the current UCI Elite World BMX Champion and she is also the World Champion in the Team Sprint with Victoria Pendleton. The pair of them also holds the world record in this event as well. She is a determined athlete and one who has her eyes set on glory at the 2012 Games.
After a very impressive start to her career, Shanaze Reade experienced a major setback at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. She had a serious fall at the last turn when she was the hot favourite to win the Olympic gold at the track event. The fall left her with a broken wrist and a dislocated pelvis and the injury was so severe that she had to miss the entire year because of it. She said that this one injury was very difficult for her to get back from but she managed it in the end. After overcoming the odds, Shanaze Reade went on to win the world BMX championships in South Africa. She obliterated the competition on the track and set the stage for something grand in two years time.
She is currently looking to win two gold medals at the London Olympics - one on the BMX and the other at the velodrome. Shanaze really needed this win to emotionally stabilise her before the 2012 Games. Her injury at the 2008 Games was brought about by an audacious move that saw her fall at the very last turn. This led to critics saying that she is not ready for an emotional pressure of dealing with winning two gold medals in two different disciplines. Her mentor and former BMX Champion and Olympian, Jamie Staff, has been very harsh by saying that Shanaze needs to grow up and become mature very quickly before the 2012 Games. Even though he also heaped praise on the young rider by saying she was extremely talented and very motivated and had all the necessary skills to win gold at the Olympics, he still said that she needed to take responsibility for her actions and her failures. Staff said that the pressure of the Olympics is huge and he saw it get to her in 2008 and he thought it just might get to her again if she was not careful. Staff is fully aware of the pressure of the Olympic Games and how it can get to an athlete. He hopes that this same pressure does not envelop Shanaze in a few years.
We will get to see just how great Shanaze Reade is in two years time and if she is able to cope with the pressure of the Olympics or not. We will see if she has matured as Staff says and if that helps her performance or if she flounders under the pressure and fails again as she did in 2008. She is an amazingly talented athlete though and she is still young at the moment. With a few more years of experience under her belt, she will emerge as a great Olympian BMX champion and show the world what she is capable of.
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