South African BMX Olympic hopeful Miyanda Maseti: A need for speed

From the very first moment she sat on a bike at four years old there was a feeling that South African Miyanda Maseti was born to ride.

When her father went with her to test out her new bike, he noticed almost straight away she was going so fast that the training wheels barely touched the ground.

“At first, he took off one training wheel. Then, next, he took off another one,” the 17-year-old tells Olympics.com, as part of a new original series ‘Playing Fields' available to stream now on Olympics.com for free.

“I just already knew how to ride a bike.”

Today, that same courageous instinct for speed now serves Maseti in a different way. The Johannesburg native is currently a five-time national champion in BMX Racing with Paris 2024 in her sights.

“I’m currently the number one female in BMX Racing in South Africa but this is only a stepping stone because my big goal is to be an Olympic champion,” Maseti says outlining her lifelong goal.

“Making it to the Paris Olympics would be a dream come true. That is the one thing I've been working towards my whole race career.”

If the young South African does make it to next year’s Games, Maseti will claim her spot with a piece of history. Since its debut at Beijing 2008, an African woman has never competed in BMX Racing.

That she is determined to make it, despite the odds, speaks more widely to Maseti’s approach to her sport: defiant and fearless.

A taste for speed and a race to progress

Maseti first started racing a BMX after watching her older brother hit the track.

“I saw him riding and I was like, ‘Oh this is so cool, I want to do that!’” Maseti remembers.

Her father was a little less keen for her to try the sport but after some persuasion, he gave her permission.

As she got to grips with racing and its brutal fitness demands with the need for short, sharp bursts of energy powered by constant pedalling, the South African admits she initially didn’t have much success.

“When I started competing, I wasn’t winning all the time,” she says with a smile. “I was at the back for a little, but I wasn’t at the back for a long time. I think it took me six months to get a hang of it and start winning races.”

From that moment on, Maseti flew across tracks, blasting her competitors aside as she learnt to match her raw speed with technique. It wasn’t too long after she decided she needed to change the stakes to keep progressing and, at the age of 11, Maseti began racing against boys to push herself and her racing.

“I decided to race boys so I could catch up because catching up makes you better, makes you faster makes you stronger, so I was like I’m going to do that,” she says. “Racing with the boys has made me so much stronger, so much more confident in myself.”

It’s not that Maseti simply races against boys, she oftentimes ends up alongside them on the podium. Being a woman in a male-dominated arena like BMX racing does mean the she finds herself being treated differently, but she insists it’s mostly in a positive way.

“People do treat me differently because I'm a woman in racing but it's not in a bad sense. they treat me differently because they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, you're a girl racing against a guy.’ They just get more impressed with how I ride.”

Championing BMX Racing for a new generation of girls

Knowing that people are studying her closely has little impact on Maseti; when she's in race mode her focus is solely on the win.

Standing at the start gate waiting to drop in, she lowers her visor and with it also disappears her sunny disposition slides away as hones in on her goal.

“When I’m at the top, my heart is beating out of my chest because I'm a pretty nervous person.

“At the starting gate, I have to tell myself to focus because when I’m at the top, I don’t really focus. I have to make sure that I focus in order to get the best start.”

With her impressive rise up her country's and continent's BMX ranks, Maseti has become a figure for younger girls to look up to. It’s a role the teenager takes on with pride often spending her free time giving back by coaching beginners.

“I love helping young girls learn it’s the most awesome thing ever. Just in general, girls riding is the most awesome thing ever because you don’t really see it that often.

“BMX has brought me a lot of confidence in myself and having that confidence I think for a lot of other girls it would be good to have that amount of confidence.

“I grew up watching all of the older girls riding and it set a pretty good example for me, and I hope the girls out there are also looking at me and I hope I am setting a good example for them.”

Maseti knows that one of the best ways to inspire those coming up would be to represent her country at the top level, it's why everything that she does comes back to her Olympic goal.

Getting to Paris would be the chance to show the world what she can do and why she's proud of where she's from.