Joris Daudet is participating in his fourth Olympic Games, with the ambition of finally winning a gold medal.
Three-time BMX Racing world champion, Joris Daudet is one of the legends of his discipline. At 33, he arrives in Paris for his fourth Olympic Games, with the ambition of finally winning a medal, after the failures of London in 2012, Rio in 2016 and Tokyo in 2021.
Joris Daudet has BMX in his blood. Coming from a family of cyclists, he discovered BMX at the age of eight and quickly turned to racing rather than freestyle. He preferred to measure himself directly against his competitors and took part in his first world championships at the age of 10. Arriving on the professional circuit in 2010, he has won a medal every year since entering the elite category, either in BMX racing or in time trials.
Having left for the United States in 2013 to measure himself against the best, he won his first American championship two years later, before an unchallenged domination. He is in fact the record holder for victories on this circuit, with six titles. Considered by his peers as one of, if not the best of all time, there is still a gap in Joris Daudet’s record.
The Frenchman has never managed to win a single medal at the Olympic Games, in three participations. In 2012, his journey ended in the semi-final after a crash that prevented him from making it to the last race. At the time, he took this setback philosophically. “Random is part of our sport. The whole game is to protect yourself with an excellent start.”
In 2016 in Rio, the scenario repeated itself with another fall, this time in the quarter-finals. A real disappointment for Joris Daudet. In 2021, he reached the final this time, but hung on again and only finished seventh, in a sport where being the best is sometimes not enough in his ultimate dream of being Olympic champion. At the Paris Games, the best placed to prevent him from finally winning a medal could be French, in the person of Romain Mahieu, world champion in 2023, and Sylvain André, world champion in 2018.