Charlotte Worthington: 'I definitely found my people at the skatepark'
From riding scooters after school to winning gold at the Olympic Games, one thing remained a constant for the British rider: she never lost touch with her roots. Olympics.com spoke to the BMX Freestyle champion about her first skatepark sessions, and how she stays in touch with her childhood riding community
Cycling BMX Freestyle
Charlotte Worthington has come a long way since breaking her bed from jumping on it too much as a child.
Nineteen years after the furniture-wrecking incident that convinced her parents to give the then six-year-old trampolining lessons, Worthington stood on top of the Tokyo 2020 podium as the first-ever Olympic champion in BMX freestyle.
The history-making 360 backflip that helped her get there would have been more than capable of breaking more furniture. Landed in the sturdy confines of Ariake Urban Sports Park, it earned her the admiration of the global BMX community instead.
The new status has not changed the British rider, however, as she remains deeply connected to her roots. Not only does Worthington still ride with friends she grew up learning tricks with, she also draws inspiration from young riders who are starting out on their BMX journey.
"I'll be sat next to the youngsters on the deck who are 10 years old, learning to do their first tricks," Worthington told Olympics.com. "I don't want to sit there and think I'm sat here as the Olympic champion. That doesn't even cross your mind. You just end up riding together."
Olympics.com spoke to Worthington to trace her journey from an energetic child and after-school scooter fanatic to an Olympic champion, and the connections that keep her grounded in the brighter spotlight.
From trampolining to BMX, with a pirouette in between
As a child, Worthington channelled her abundant energy into weekly trampolining lessons. Tennis, shot put and batting games followed.
She enjoyed sports thanks to her "try hard, competitive" nature, but did not truly connect to any of them.
"In school, I feel like sport was really narrow-minded," Worthington said. "As a girl, you kind of were expected to do rounders or ballet or gymnastics or netball. Those sports are kind of fun, but that felt really narrow-sighted for me and I definitely knew that I liked individual sports more, and the sports that I liked just weren't even mentioned in school and that was crazy.
"A lot of girls in high school didn't like sports in general. It was kind of uncool in my generation to even like sports.”
It was on Christmas Day, when she was 13, that things changed. Caving in to her requests, her family gifted the future Olympic champion a scooter.
“I remember my family buying it for me and thinking, 'What on earth is she going to do with this? Like she wants it, OK, we'll get it’," Worthington recalled. "And it was something that totally hooked me because it was almost like a meditation.
"I could be in my own world and that made me so happy. I was never that fond of team sports. I didn't always thrive in that situation, whereas this could be my own creative expression. I could think of new ideas, put new lines, new tricks together."
Hopping on the bus after school, Worthington rushed to get to the skatepark. It was a place where she not only discovered a sport she loved, but also a community of like-minded kids.
"I definitely found my people at the skatepark," she said. "And once I did that, I didn't care about what people at school were saying. It was like, 'Yeah, you can say that about me, but I'm going to get to the skate park after and have a great time with my real friends'.”
Pike jumps on a trampoline, aces on the tennis court, tails whips and bar spins on the scooter - are there any moves that the fearless Worthington could not tackle?
As it turns out, yes. Arabesques and demi-plies.
“I couldn't hack ballet," she admitted to Olympics.com with a laugh. "I did one taster session as a kid and I was just like, 'This is awful. This is the worst thing I could imagine myself doing', and I never went back.”
Freestyle spirit: No boundaries for inspiration
Packed with skateboarders and scooter riders, the urban parks in Manchester were also a haven for BMX freestylers and Worthington, still a teen, was quick to take notice.
The different sports equipment did not matter, nor did the gender of the riders.
“I was looking up to the male riders and I found that so inspiring," Worthington said, singling out local rider Harry Main as a particular inspiration. "I never really saw that boundary of male versus female and thinking, 'I can't do that because I'm a female'. I just looked at it and thought, 'That's an amazing way to ride a bike. I'd love to do that trick'. And I always have done.”
At 19, having left college where she studied photography and graphic design, and now working full-time as a chef in a restaurant, Worthington felt that she had hit the ceiling with what she wanted to do on a scooter.
Picking up a BMX bike gave her new motivation and rekindled her childhood love for learning new tricks.
“I was always in that environment and I had a lot of BMX rider friends and it sparked that same, ‘Ah, this is awesome. I can progress, I can set little goals. I can have this community around me’," Worthington said. "There's a lot of things I loved about it and it just felt like I was starting again and that was really exciting.”
Switching from scooters to BMX helped Worthington rediscover her love for learning new tricks - and took her to the top of the sports world.
Charlotte Worthington: Going back to her roots
The change from scooter to BMX, motivated by the onset of boredom, would ultimately take Worthington to the top of the podium at Tokyo 2020.
And it is in this status that the sports star now returns to ride with old friends who were there to applaud, commiserate and joke as she learned her first tricks.
“To this day it's what you fall back on," Worthington said. "Although it's an individual sport, the community at the skatepark is your team and you bring each other up and at the end of the day all you really want to do is go there, ride bikes, help each other out and have a good time.”
While the two parks in Manchester where Worthington grew up riding have since closed down, the community remained intact and simply relocated to new venues.
Now training at Adrenaline Alley in Corby, Worthington keeps in touch with most of them and visits whenever she is in town.
“I can go there any day of the week and guaranteed that there’s going to be someone there that I know," she said. "And I never go and feel like the Olympic champion that's there to complete. It's nice to just get that reminder of, 'This is why it all started'. You have a chat, you have a catch up on the deck with all your friends. You always go back to it.”
Worthington went from spending hours in the skate park after school to learn new tricks on a scooter to becoming the first ever BMX freestyle Olympic champion.
Street inspiration for an Olympic stage
Once a kid who was watching other riders and drawing inspiration from them, nothing has changed for 27-year-old Worthington since becoming an Olympic champion.
Competing alongside the best athletes from around the globe, she can just as easily find inspiration by watching a local kid riding a second-hand bike.
“It doesn't even have to be a literal move, it could just be someone’s attitude towards riding,” Worthington said. “You can't help but watch someone grind it out, try a trick over and over and then eventually, nail it and succeed. Or even if they don’t, it's still pretty inspiring. And I think, 'Wow, I want to have that kind of dedication and I want to put that kind of work and commitment into the way I'm riding'."
One rider that Worthington was particularly impressed with recently is a teenager called Thomas who, like her, transitioned from riding scooters to BMX bikes.
“He's naturally got this really flowy style," she said. "He's not got that many tricks and he's by no means a pro rider - he's only in school - but he just did this one line in the bowl where he kind of goes around the corner and he pops out and goes into the other side of the hip and it just looked awesome and I thought, 'Wow, I've been looking at that for so long and I've not had the guts to do it and he's just gone and done it'."
Inspired by the teen's bold moves, Worthington took to her own bike bike to learn the line. After "a couple of goes and a bit of building" she proudly says she managed to figure it out.
So, will Thomas be hearing compliments from the Olympic champion soon?
“I should have told him that I did it. I totally forgot!" Worthington exclaimed. "Next time I see him, I'll say, 'I stole your line'.”