Their reinvention on wheels
CHULA VISTA -- The turning point for Mike Day came about five years ago, just as he was making the transition from teenager to adult.
Up until then, bike racing had been a hobby. Something fun.
Then he moved up to elite racing and things changed.
“It was a rude awakening,” Day said.
“Those guys were full-grown dudes that are in the gym, they work out, they live, they eat this. This is their career. And I was just a young kid having fun riding my bike. So I got smoked.”
In retrospect, maybe those guys should have let Day win once in a while because when the losing got old, Day went out and got a new coach and a new attitude. It wasn’t long before he won a BMX Supercross World Cup title and claimed silvers in a World Cup and a World Championship en route to a one-sided victory in June’s U.S. Olympic trials, which earned him a berth in the inaugural BMX competition at the Beijing Games.
“It was a good learning experience,” Day says now.
“You only get your butt kicked so much before you need to change something. And once I did that, I kind of set aside a year and said this is the year I’m going to put it together.”
Until then BMX had come easily to Day, who grew up in Santa Clarita riding with his older brother Dave before taking up the sport competitively on his 9th birthday. Three years later he was racing internationally, even though he still found himself explaining what he did to classmates who confused BMX racing with the popular freestyle BMX demonstrations that included jumps and tricks.
“No, I race,” he explained. “I try to go fast and go around the track.”
And by his senior year at Valencia High he was doing that well enough to turn pro.
“He just really liked it. I don’t why, really,” said Day’s father, Steve. “It was just something that we did. We met a lot of people. Mike did well at it. And we enjoyed just doing it. It just kept going from there.”
Day’s breakout season came in 2004 with podium finishes in both the X Games and the UCI Supercross World Cup. By last season he was the top-ranked BMX rider in North America, which helped earn him one of eight spots in the Olympic trials.
Only the trials winner was guaranteed a trip to Beijing, however.
Kyle Bennett, the top U.S. rider in 2008, won the first U.S. spot as the top points-earner during the BMX championship season while the third Olympic berth was handed out by team coaches based on a complicated formula that emphasized results in international competition.
But with the final event of the year, the World Championships, being contested in China less than two weeks before the U.S. trials, Day decided to gamble, passing up the international points to stay back at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista and practice, staking his hopes solely on the trials.
And the roll of the dice worked, with Day blowing the field away in a dominating performance.
“He was confident and determined,” Steve Day said.
“I was worried about what was going to happen if he didn’t make it in. Because he put all his marbles in one basket. [But] it ended up he made the right decision.”
A week later, when Day came home to visit, father and son found themselves alone with each other and their thoughts on the back side of a golf course.
Suddenly the same thing popped into both their heads simultaneously .
“We both said, ‘Man, can you believe it? You made the Olympics?’ ” Steve Day recalled.
“I’m still on Cloud 9. That day was a pretty overwhelming day.”
And if Mike makes the right gambles again come Beijing, the rest of the BMX world will soon be saying the same thing: That Day was a pretty overwhelming Day.
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