Olympic BMX star Kieran Reilly: ‘I’m so proud of the North – hopefully one day people won’t have to move’

With ten seconds left on the clock in his final run at the men’s BMX freestyle Olympic final, Kieran Reilly pulled it all out of the bag.

In BMX jargon: he performed a 360 double whip into a flair whip, pushed into a 720 double tail whip, and finished with a perfect double whip as the buzzer sounded.

In layman’s terms: he smashed it.

“At the end of the second run, I just threw my bike away,” the Olympian told the Big Issue. The performance bagged him a Paris 2024 silver medal.

• Olympic champion Laura Kenny: ‘I was told cycling wasn’t a proper job’
• Millions of Brits ‘locked out’ of cycling due to complete lack of bike parking, report finds

“And I felt that no matter what happened that day, I was going to leave everything on the course, and I was going to achieve my dream of riding at the Olympic games. So that feeling of letting go of the bike and it being done – that was special.”

BMX freestyle made its Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020. Characterised by high-flying stunts and dramatic falls, it is undoubtedly of the most exciting spectacles at the games.

Reilly’s run – described by British Cycling as “incredible” – secured him 93.91 points, just shy of the 94.82 clinched by Argentina’s Jose Torres Gil.  

The young cyclist’s subsequent silver medal is merely his latest success. In 2022, he became the first person in the world to land a triple flair (that’s three backflips and a 180-degree spin). At just 23, he is the national, European and world champion at freestyle BMX.

But without a humble local skatepark in Leam Lane, Gateshead, he says, none of it would have happened.

“Once I got a BMX [aged nine], I pretty much spent every waking moment of the day at the skate park,” he said. The tricks might be bigger now, but landing something new “feels just like it did then”.

The park looks pretty unremarkable: a bowl, a couple of banks and ledges, scattered bits of graffiti. For the young Kieran Reilly, it meant “absolutely everything.”  He stayed there all day, only coming back once it got dark and his parents “stood at the door and whistled” for him.

“My social life, the only hobby that I was ever interested in, was riding,” he said. “My parents would always say I never put work into anything, and you don’t as a kid. But when I was on my bike it was different.

“I loved putting the work in to learn new things; I always wanted to be better than my friends, I wanted to beat them to learning this trick.”

Reilly also loved the nearby Dynamix, a not-for-profit indoor facility also in Gateshead. A planning permission row with the local council has since closed the park – an outcome Reilly describes as “really sad”.

“It was an amazing facility, a lot of work was put into it by the owners and the community,” he said.  “Then it was closed down and now a warehouse is stood there. That was a huge opportunity that was missed.”

Councillor Gary Haley, Cabinet Member for Children and Young People at Gateshead Council, said that funding challenges made youth centre provision difficult. 

“It is great that Kieran is so loyal to Gateshead, and is speaking up for improving our area. We know how much he cares about his home town and is a great ambassador for us.”

“We would be very happy to talk to him and to work together on improving services.

“However, we still have significant challenges around funding all the services we would like to provide for our residents.  

“Gateshead suffered 14 years of cuts to its budget between 2010 and 2024. As a result we now have £1,050 less to spend per resident than we did 14 years ago, with our budget having reduced by 68% over the same period.”

The council has supported several community initiatives and organisations across the borough, including grassroots sports and fitness clubs but “recognises” the impact closures has on local people.

As the number of council-run youth clubs continues to fall – plummeting by 1,243 between 2010 and 2023, according to UNISON union data – skate centres help to fill the vacuum.

Somewhere like Dynamix, for example had “plans to pretty much become an urban youth club,” Reilly says. “They wanted to have a place for people to come and take up these new hobbies, BMX, skate, scooter and dance, gymnastics, trampoline… but now there’s nothing.”

The UK’s 75 indoor skate parks provide opportunities to over a million children and young people a week. But financial pressures and a lack of available grant funding make it difficult for them to operate.

“The vast majority are charities, community led organisations and not-for-profit businesses, working to very tight budgets,” says SkateboardGB.

Kieran Reilly would like to see councils put more money into “a diverse range” of youth activities – including better skate facilities. Currently, opportunities to engage local young people are being “drastically overlooked.”

“If you look at what happens when you haven’t got the facilities, kids have nowhere to go, they just cause trouble,” he said. “When I was growing up, you know what I mean, all the friends that didn’t have a hobby or didn’t have somewhere to do something, that’s what they end up doing.”

“If you look at the local park I rode, it’s not considered big. But I’ve been there on a summer’s day when there’s been 30 of us riding there all day. The better the facility, the more people you’re going to bring in.”

Kieran Reilly and his friends would “pedal miles to go to a different skate park”. As an adult, he’s moved hundreds of kilometres from home for the same reason: a lack of appropriate facilities in Newcastle compelled the cyclist to relocate to Corby, near Leicester.

He makes it back home as often as he can – and is “really grateful” for the training and support he receives – in Colby but wishes there were greater provision in the north.

 “I think I probably annoy people, how much I talk about the north being better than everywhere else and calling everyone down here southerners,” he jokes. “But I’m so, so proud of where I’m from… Hopefully one day people won’t have to move to get the training they need.”

Big Issue is demanding an end to extreme poverty. Will you ask your MP to join us?

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. Big Issue exists to give homeless and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income. To support our work buy a copy of the magazine or get the app from the App Store or Google Play.