National BMX champs crowned

By Wendy Booher

World BMX champion, Kyle Bennett (Free Agent), and Jill Kintner (GT) claimed elite national BMX titles at USA Cycling’s 2008 BMX National Championships in DeSoto, Texas, on Saturday.

With both Bennett and Kintner seeking to clinch automatic nominations to the Olympic team, their victories added eight points each to their existing leads in the national points rankings.

Bennett began his national title pursuit by winning his first moto despite a tough start from the outside lane.

“It’s hard to win from lane eight,” Bennett said. “You gotta’ be a bike-length out to win from lane eight.”

He repeated the win in the second moto and, having earned enough points to qualify for the semifinal, he yielded the win to Tyler Brown (Looking) in the third. Racing apart from Bennett in two other of the four elite men’s groups, GT racers Joey Bradford and Randy Stumpfhauser also swept their first two motos and yielded tops spots to other racers in order to rest up for the semifinals.

David Herman (Intense-Bawls Guaran) succeeded in holding off defending national champion, Donny Robinson (Hyper), throughout three motos until a crash during the semifinals took him out of title contention.

The Main Event lined up Bennett, Bradford, Danny Caluag (Intense-Bawls Guaran), Jarrett Kolich (Avent-Bombshell), Alan Hudson (Psykopath), Barry Nobles (Clayborn-Fly) and Jason Richardson (Haro) to take aim at the title, which Bennett narrowly seized ahead of Caluag.

Bennett, who suffered a torn ACL in October 2006 that forced him off his bike for seven months, stayed away from last year’s national championships in favor of recuperating instead. Last year at this time, Bennett spent his days recovering and preparing for a points chase that could land him the automatic nomination for the Olympic team. The nomination will go to whoever has the highest number of points in the USA Cycling BMX Rankings on May 31. Bennett now holds a 44-point lead ahead of Robinson in the rankings.

A former world junior BMX champion, Kintner returned to BMX racing fulltime after successfully defending her World 4X title last September. Now with an Olympic spot on the line, Kintner has been trading victories with her chief rival, Arielle Martin (Formula) and before Saturday only one point separated the two in the national rankings.

Eleven racers rolled to the gates in two groups with Martin leading one and Kintner leading the other. Kintner swept all three motos while Martin chose to hang back and rest up in the third moto after having won the first two. A timing glitch prevented top finishers from choosing which lane they wanted for the final and Kintner was placed in the dubious lane #8 to contest the title.

“I had to dig extra deep in the final,” Kintner said. “Your head is different when you start on the outside and you just have to get to the straightaway first; the final was my strongest start of the day.”

Kintner earned the title and eight more points while Martin’s runner-up finish at Nationals earned her seven points, which puts her only two points behind Kintner in the race for a spot on the Olympic team.

Racers leave for Adelaide, Australia in one week to contest the next BMX Supercross World Cup race, which takes place the weekend of April 11-12. Only the Adelaide race and another one in Denmark in mid May remain before the World Championships take place in Taiyuan, China at the end of May.

FILED UNDER: Mountain