Connor Fields: I don't feel any pressure, I will forever be an Olympic champion

USA's BMX racing star Connor Fields knows what it takes to win.

"In high-level sport, it comes down to the mental game," the Texas native told Olympics.com.

The reigning Olympic champion is approaching his third Games feeling a more confident and experienced rider.

"When I was young I used to say: 'Experience is what old people say to make themselves feel better about being old'. And now that I'm older, I truly get the value of that experience," he said.

"There really isn't much I haven't seen, gone through, been through, done. And so that helps me stay real calm and kind of confident in myself."

The 28-year-old has now been competing for almost two decades and knows how to approach the important races.

"After racing so frequently, I'm used to just showing up, seeing a track, learning it, going," he reveals.

Fields skipped the last two World Cup events in Verona and Bogota and continued his training on his local BMX track in Henderson, Nevada.

Being ready, physically and mentally, for the big day is what matters.

"In our sport - and you can just look at the data and the numbers - the top handful of athletes are so close in a lot of times that it oftentimes just comes down to: when that pressure is on who can get the job done?

"That's something that separates the Usain Bolts, the Kristin Armstrongs of the world from - and there's nothing wrong with this - from a competitor who just just goes in and gets 10th place."

The value of experience

Fields is now a more mature athlete than nine years ago, when he made his Olympic debut crashing out in the final at London 2012 and settling for seventh.

"I was 19 years old, I was living in my parents' house, I graduated high school the year before, I was a kid," he remembers.

Fast forward four years to Rio: the Texan was able to held his nerves to take the lead before the last turn and comfortably win the title.

"In Rio I was 23 years old, I had a steady girlfriend, I was a little bit more of an adult."

How does he feel ahead of Tokyo?

"This time I'll be 28. That's a big difference between being 23 and 28. And so I think the natural maturity that happened just from life experience and having bills and living on your own and just being an adult definitely helped."

If in London the young Connor struggled to cope with the expectations, his mental approach now will be completely different and being the reigning Olympic champion won't represent a source of extra pressure, according to him:

"No one is gong to care that I won the last one. It's a completely blank slate for everyone, myself included," he said.

"I really don't feel like I'm defending anything, my gold medal is sitting upstairs. No one is going to come in my house, take it from me and say, 'this is mine now!'.

"I will forever, for the rest of my life, be an Olympic champion. I will be the 2016 Olympic BMX champion. Now I have an opportunity to go do it again, like that is so cool, like I have a chance to try and do it again."

Exuding confidence

Fields admits that racing at the Olympics has always been a really intense experience for him:

"Whenever people ask how it feels at the Olympics, I say 'imagine every single emotion you could feel and turn it up to 10.' So you're excited as you could possibly be, but you're also as anxious as you could possibly be."

Winning gold in Rio certainly changed his life and helped him feel mentally stronger and more confident.

_"_I don't get recognised in public. I'm not famous, I'm not a millionaire. I need a job when I retire from racing. But the biggest change for me is that there's nothing that I will ever doubt myself with again. If I can overcome and work hard enough to achieve that, there's nothing else really that scares me," the rider said.

"If I decided tomorrow that I wanted to learn how to do whatever daunting task, I could always draw back on that experience of [when] I was 14. I decided I wanted to win the Olympics and nine years later, I did it. And so it's just that deep-rooted belief in yourself that you can do anything you set your mind to.

"That's probably the biggest thing for me as well as it definitely gives you a little bit of 'street cred'. People take you a little more seriously when they find out you've won an Olympic gold medal and there's not many those floating around."

A longer BMX track in Tokyo

A group of strong rivals, from the Netherlands' Niek Kimmann and Twan van Gendt to France's Sylvain Andre and Joris Daudet, will compete for gold against him.

Since BMX racing was introduced to the Olympics in 2008, only Latvia's Maris Strombergs and Colombia's Mariana Pajon have managed to retain their title.

An additional challenge will come from the brand-new Olympic track at the Ariake Urban Sports Park.

"For Tokyo, the real only thing that's different and that's much more unique from other courses is the length. It's significantly longer," Fields said.

"So watching the Test event happen and seeing the lap times, the lap times were like eight to nine seconds longer than in Rio, which doesn't sound like much. But when Rio is a 34-second lap and now we're talking 42-43-second laps, that's a 20-25% increase.

"So it is a significant amount longer that we are going to have to train for. So that's really been one of my main focus in training is just working on that conditioning so I can make that extra 10 seconds and not get tired."