How a remote Utah business park became the center of BMX Freestyle in the USA

Hannah Roberts has won just about every major women’s professional BMX freestyle title out there. Not just one of every kind. Closer to nearly all that exist.

Roberts, 23, won her sixth consecutive UCI BMX World Championship in December, making her the only woman to have ever won that event. She won gold at both Pan American Games in which the discipline was offered (2019 and ’23). And last year, when X Games first made women’s BMX freestyle part of its program, she won that gold medal, too.

This week, Salt Lake City will host the X Games’ BMX, skateboarding and motoX events, and Roberts can’t wait. It’s not just the prospect of winning more hardware that has her hyped, but also something much rarer.

“This will probably be the only event in my life,” she said, “that I’ll be able to sleep in my own bed and then go and compete.”

Roberts moved to Utah in March to train at a facility started by a local dad who wanted to give his daughter, an up-and-coming BMX racer, a better place to practice. In doing so, Roberts may become a BMX trailblazer once again. COR Athlete, the facility built last year by Joe Sirlin in a remote office park in South Jordan, has become the hub for USA Cycling’s BMX freestyle teams. Roberts was the first pro athlete to move to the area to train there, but Sirlin said he believes she won’t be the last.

“We have multiple other people exploring relocating here full-time to train and to live in Utah,” Sirlin said. “So our goal is to help get athletes like that here, but also help get the next generation a place to evolve as an athlete.”

Building a solution in South Jordan

The trip to France with the Team USA BMX squad was supposed to be a learning experience for Sirlin’s teenage daughter, Keir. Yet it was Sirlin who got an education.

A former construction foreman and facility and event manager for various major sporting events — including Formula 1 and Moto GP races, PGA tournaments, Super Bowls and X Games — Sirlin couldn’t help but notice the ramps at the 2023 World Cup Fise in Montpellier were much larger than anything he’d seen in the United States. He asked Ryan Nyquist, a BMX legend and Team USA’s coach at the time, about the discrepancy.

“When we first saw these big ramps, I asked him, just person to person, ‘Hey, why does the United States not have anything this big for the riders to work on?’ Because we don’t, and Europe does. Australia, Japan, China — all these countries have these facilities, but we do not. And I asked him how we could change that.”

Nyquist said USA Cycling had struggled to come up with the funding to build a World Cup-caliber course. So, Sirlin came up with a solution.

Calling upon his contacts in the construction industry, he facilitated the construction of a temporary course inside a newly built business park off the Mountain View Corridor in South Jordan, minutes from where he and his family had moved in 2021. He called in heralded BMX park builder Nate Wessel to design the course with input from the athletes who would represent Team USA in Paris, including Roberts, who was training in Nyquist’s backyard. She requested a spine — two ramps connected at their apex by a small ledge) and a step-over (where the landing area is higher than the takeoff area).

“Those two things freak me out most on courses,” she said. “So I’ve got to ride them a lot, I guess.”

More BMX riders are calling Utah home

At the time, the course was meant as a quick fix to prepare Team USA athletes for the Paris 2024 Olympics. When it opened in March 2024, Olympic athletes — including Roberts — traveled there from around the country for training camps every two weeks until the Summer Games began in late July. When they left France in early August, they brought back four top-eight finishes. That included a silver medal won by Perris Benegas in a women’s competition that saw Roberts, the favorite after taking silver with a broken foot in the event’s debut in Tokyo, place eighth despite breaking her hand and injuring her shoulder in a crash during warmups.

With those results, USA Cycling was in no hurry to see the course dismantled. In January, it extended its partnership with COR-Athlete for at least another year.

“This facility has been a game-changer for our BMX Freestyle program,” Jim Miller, the chief of sports performance, said in a news release announcing the extension. “The world-class facility and the partnership with COR-Athlete enabled our team to push their limits and perform at the highest level on the world stage. We’re thrilled to continue this collaboration and build on the success we achieved in 2024.”

Likewise, Roberts was reluctant to lose her favorite practice facility. So, she rented out her house in North Carolina to make a new home out West.

“When I finally pulled the trigger, I didn’t know X Games was coming,” said Roberts, now one of Clearfield’s newest residents. “So it was legit this. My whole focus was this park and trying to, one, help it succeed and be able to stay around, but also just be able to train here.”

Roberts has accomplished both.

She trains at the facility about three hours a day, she said, but she spends many more hours working behind the scenes. Sirlin pays her to be part office manager, part event director and part youth coach for camps hosted at COR-Athlete.

Others have since followed Roberts’ path. Angie Marino, a pro rider who performed a BMX stunt in the movie “Bad Moms,” also moved from North Carolina to Utah, Sirlin said. And Roberts said athletes like Nikita Ducarroz of Switzerland, who will also compete at X Games Salt Lake City, have used her home as a base camp.

Sirlin said he’d like to go beyond bringing in athletes for training and bring them in for World Cup-caliber competitions. The U.S. has only hosted one BMX freestyle World Cup stop, and that was in 2016. The course is expected to host the national championships next spring.

Considering her propensity for being on the cutting edge of the sport, Sirlin knows he may have been wise to get Roberts involved.

“She has accomplished more by a female in BMX freestyle than anyone in the history of the sport … and she’s only 23 years old,” he said. “I think she pushed the envelope of a very male-dominated sport that now is seeing 100% progression by countries all over the world and women all over the world, and she was the benchmark. That’s what I think Hannah has done for the sport.”

She says she’s nowhere near done, either. Next up is X Games Salt Lake City. Then, according to her long-term plan, every Summer Olympics through 2036. She expects to be based out of Utah for all of it, she said.

She just has to get that first title — to a house with a yard for her dogs — and let fate take it from there.