Ryan Williams found the trick on his second attempt. On the narrow, ultra-tall Tower Bridge vert wall — the most exposed obstacle on the Cal Expo course — the Australian threw an alley-oop 540 frontflip flair and rode away clean. No rider had landed it before. The Oliver Twist, he called it, a nod to the late musician Oliver Tree. It won him gold in the Dave Mirra BMX Park Best Trick and the twelfth X Games gold medal of his career.
How it was decided
Ryan Williams won the final in a room full of specialists.
During the 20-minute session fueled by progressive moves and never-been-landed tricks, one rider soared above the rest, with Williams emerging as the gold medalist after posting a unique trick on the most difficult obstacle on the course.
The decisive moment came on his second try.
Williams navigated a burly obstacle and finessed a 540 frontflip flair on the narrow and ultra-tall Tower Bridge vert wall for the Best Trick victory.
Daniel Sandoval joined him on the podium, landing a technical down flair windshield wiper high above the lip on his fourth attempt to clinch the bronze medal.
Williams did not hide what it meant to him.
"So stoked! I've been dreaming of doing one of those tricks," he told reporters after the event, noting how hard a Best Trick win is against riders that good.
He was not finished. The next day, in BMX Dirt Best Trick, Williams landed another first — a frontflip cannon ball nothing front bike flip — and took gold again. It was his thirteenth X Games gold.
The long climb
The result sits inside a body of work few in action sports can match.
Williams now owns 15 X Games medals, twelve of them gold and three silver.
That standing is not new; the manner of it is. Where much of his reputation was built on dirt and on the Nitro Circus stage, the Park Best Trick gold was won on vert, on the hardest wall on the floor, against the discipline's purest technicians. The weekend also underlined how close the margins remain. In the standard BMX Dirt final,
the defending gold medalist suffered a severe slam on his first run before answering on Run 2 with a double front flip, front flip inward bike flip, and double backflip 360 on the final hit for 91.66 points and the silver medal
, beaten by teammate Brady Baker.
At 32, Williams keeps naming tricks that did not exist before him. The Oliver Twist is now one of them.
