It kept falling so I told my dad there was something wrong. “I went home and got some food and it was when I was sitting at the dinner table that I noticed I couldn’t hold my head up. “I felt a bit rough after 10 minutes but I’d been wearing a neck brace and didn’t feel like anything was broken,” he says. “My back wheel caught on a pile of dirt on take-off, flipped me into the air and I came straight down on my head and snapped the chin piece off my helmet.”īadly winded and in shock, it took a while for Henderson to calm down. “It was the first lap of practice,” he recalls.
While Henderson always seemed destined for a high-flying life on two wheels, for a long time it looked like he would be riding a bike with an engine, until a bad crash during a motocross event as a teenager left him with a broken C3 vertebrae in his neck. But it was my first euros in freestyle BMX so I was happy to make it into the final and finish 10th.” I was meant do a double tail-whip so I kind of missed out there, which was a bit annoying. Going into the second run I made sure to make the right adjustments, did the double flip good but then, on the next trick, I do a 360 whip. “But when you’ve got so much stuff to do you’re glad when you hear that buzzer because you’re absolutely wrecked. “It doesn’t sound like a lot of time,” admits Henderson. In freestyle BMX, each contestant gets two 60-second runs at the ramps to try and impress the judges with the number and difficulty of their tricks going towards their final score. When your foot hits the ground you’re immediately deducted points so after that I just tried to salvage the run, and do the best I could.” But I was so amped up for the first run that I made a slight mistake on the double flip and dabbed my foot.
“We got a huge crowd and a great reaction so I think people really enjoyed it. “The funny thing is, I was having so much fun that I actually wasn’t nervous,” he says of becoming the first Irish rider to make a European freestyle final. When Ryan Henderson flipped, rolled and tail-whipped himself into the BMX Freestyle final at the European Championships in Munich just over a week ago, the 27-year-old from Belfast kicked open the doors of an exciting new Olympic sport to wide-eyed kids all over the country.