Reynolds joins Saya Sakakibara as Australia’s representatives in the women’s BMX racing event starting Thursday at the Ariake Urban Sports Park, with Anthony Dean our representative in the men’s event.

The Olympic journey is hard at the best of times. And over the past four years, Reynolds has experienced both the highs and extreme lows.

After making the finals but missing a medal in both London and Rio, Reynolds, the 2013 world championship silver medallist, was dropped from Australia’s elite program in 2017, her scholarship gone.

Then her coach Sam Willoughby, the two-time world champion who finished sixth at Rio, suffered a tragic race accident in the USA, injuring his spine.

All of which led to Reynolds feeling she had ‘hit rock bottom’.

“I was on my own for a couple of years and I just knew it was going to be a really tough road and being an individual sport there’s a lot of expenses, you’re by yourself a lot of the time so you’ve really got to make it happen,” Reynolds recalls.

“Just being removed and kind of left on my own, and for me personally feeling I’d hit rock bottom a little bit, physically, emotionally, everything, I just couldn’t find my right path to what was going to work for me on the track and to get the best out of myself.

“Sam Willoughby, my coach, he’s had my back since day one. It was a couple of weeks after the Rio Olympics we sat down and said let's work together, then he had his accident, so everything kind of flipped upside down in 2016 and 2017 and the first couple of years were tough. I’d travel to races and World Cups alone, and obviously pay for it myself, and didn’t really have much support.

“But we had a plan and I trusted that. Obviously a very long-term plan and it started to come together at the end of 2019 and I knew coming into 2020, an Olympic year, that was when I really had to step up and make it happen and perform and be selected and put my hand up and say ‘hey, I’m still here’, which I did.  I had a really good start to 2020 and got back on to the national team.

“Coming into this one, physically I feel the most prepared I’ve ever felt for any Olympic Games. I’ve obviously had the experience, I’m 30 now, I feel as ready as I’ll ever been and I feel very capable of being a competitive threat.”

Reynolds’ refusal to quit is now set to reap its reward, as she joins an exclusive club of Aussie triple Olympians that includes Dawn Fraser, Cathy Freeman and Betty Cuthbert.

And she is just the fourth BMX rider in Olympic history to achieve the feat, joining Colombia’s Mariana Pajón , American Alise Post and The Netherlands’ Laura Smulders.

“It’s definitely special (to become a triple Olympian) and it’s been a long, tough road this last one,” Reynolds said.

“Out of all of them, this one feels so different again on top of COVID and how the last 12 months have been.

“I’m privileged and honoured to be here.”

The Ariake Urban Sports Park track will provide a stern test for riders when competition begins at 11am AEST on Thursday for both the men’s and women’s competitions, with the semi-finals and finals held on Friday.

“It’s rock hard and obviously that makes the laps faster, and the track speed a lot faster,” Reynolds said of the track.

“It’s a very big track, its long in distance, the corners are really big and wide open, the jumps are fairly big, they’re steep take-offs, so that just brings a bit more technicality into the race, you need to be more precise.

“When you make mistakes on a big track you pay for it because you have to find you speed again and then you get tired faster. And on long race days in hot weather and on a long track, saving your energy and maintaining your speed around the track as effortlessly as possible is going to be a key.

“You don’t have to necessarily go 110% at every point of the track. If you can stay smooth, if you can catch every backside nicely, not hang up your back wheel or lose a bit of speed here and there, that’s absolutely going to add up.”

Reynolds, from Western Australia, now spends most of her time training in the USA at San Diego’s Chula Vista training centre, which has helped provide her with the best possible preparation for the Games during the challenges imposed by COVID restrictions.

“Home is still Australia of course but I’ve created a bit of a life in the US and I feel lucky to be able to be there racing all the time, there’s the US series, and just having hands on work with Sam every day has helped me a tonne,” Reynolds said.

And when she is not training and racing, Reynolds is hard at work building her race bike.

“I always build my bikes, I always have,” Reynolds said.

“Growing up, I just figured it out myself. I enjoy it as therapy and with some of my previous coaches, as part of our training routine we would change a lot of things on my bike for different sessions and it was just back and forth, it was constant every day, so I just had to figure it out.

“I had to be able to do that to train well and it had a purpose, so that I knew how to operate my bike.

“Still to this day I would rather do it myself, I know what I’ve done and I trust it.”

David Taylor