US BMX Olympian Alise Willoughby finds 'biggest motivation' in her husband and coach

PARIS — The easy thing would have been to move.

Pack up their home in Chula Vista, Calif., head back to his native Australia, start over, leave the past behind. Never see the BMX cycling developmental track again, avoid reliving the 2016 summer day when the 2012 silver medalist was casually warming up, erase the triggers — flipping backwards on his bike on a tiny roller, hanging in the air upside down for a moment, slamming his back and neck into the crown of the earthen hump, fracturing his C6 and C7 vertebrae, not feeling his legs, being air-lifted by helicopter to the hospital, wondering what he would tell his fiancé, also a BMX racer, who was with her family in Minnesota headed to a Twins game to be honored as a 2016 silver medalist.

When Alise Post arrived at the hospital, Sam Willoughby had decided what to tell her: “You’re not marrying me. You’re not marrying a vegetable.”

Alise looked back at him tearfully and shook her head.

Eight years later, they’re happily married. Alise Willoughby is the Olympic gold medal favorite in the BMX competition that begins Thursday. Sam coaches her from his wheelchair.

And they still live in Chula Vista. Still train on the track where he crashed. Where, as he says matter-of-factly: “I went from sitting on the start line at the Olympic Games to learning to brush my teeth again in the space of three weeks.”

It’s a poignant, and instructive, piece of symbolism. You can avert life’s bumps, or you can just keep riding over them.

“It’s crazy that particular jump hasn’t changed, like that whole thing, it’s exactly the same,” says Alise, who changed her last name to Willoughby after their 2019 wedding. “Honestly, I sometimes think about it more for him than I do me, having to be there and coaching me and having to watch me ride it, because he’s so out of control in that situation and has to look at it.

“For me, there was a time when it affected me more than it does now. I definitely went through a period where it was, like, whoa — where a) getting back on the bike was a process; and b) being able to go there and not evoke emotion.

“It took time. But we’ve both moved on.”

That includes her husband.

“I mean, I would get satisfaction in putting a bulldozer through it,” Sam says. “That’s just because I like to break stuff that breaks me. But I don’t have a ton of emotions. I don’t think about it a lot. I’ll have the odd day when it comes up on a five-year anniversary or something like that, when you look at it and think about it a bit.

“But I never associated my accident with a jump or a track or with the sport. It just happened. I never really looked at it like that jump did that to me. And honestly, it’s a small jump. … It was a freak accident.”

The road from then to now hasn’t been smooth. Sam admits to a “dark stage” of rehabilitation, both physically and mentally. Alise had a run of good form abruptly halted by the pandemic, crashed out of the Olympic final in Tokyo, then endured a series of ankle, knee, leg and hand injuries to her 5-foot-2 frame.

The Chula Vista training center, once the global epicenter of BMX with two full-scale replicas of Olympic tracks, is not the same as when Alise moved there from Minnesota 15 years ago. In 2017, the facility was transferred from the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee to the city of Chula Vista and a private management company. One of the tracks has been abandoned, with weeds growing through cracks in the asphalt. The other has been refurbished, but the Willoughbys don’t have regular access to it.

And Alise is 33 in a sport increasingly populated by youngsters. The last three gold medalists have been 20, 22 and 24.

She’s also the reigning world champion, though, winning wire-to-wire two months ago in Rock Hill, S.C., eight years of trials, tribulations, tragedy, trauma, turbulence, tears and tests melting away in a magical 32.513 seconds.

“I think it’s just the way life is: It’s not always fair,” she says. “Just because you show up and do everything right, the game doesn’t care. You’re not entitled to anything. Once you grow to learn and accept that you just have to put in the work with no guarantees, I think you’re mentally more able to accept the outcome of things.

“That’s something Sam’s injury has taught us. It’s not fair. Why? Why did that happen? He’d never had a surgery, never broken a bone. It’s crazy. But then I lost my mom to cancer, she was 54 years old. My dad, he smokes like a chimney, does all the wrong things, and he’s healthy as can be. It’s just life.”

The months and years after Sam’s accident were devoted to him. There was a surgery to remove his C6 vertebrae and replace it with a titanium cage. Doctors fused his C5 and C7 vertebrae with a plate and four screws. He spent time at a rehabilitation clinic in Colorado that specializes in paralyzing spinal injuries while the wedding was postponed. Two years later, he was able to propel himself down the aisle, upright, with the aid of a medical walker but uses a wheelchair for most daily chores.

The mental rehabilitation came from BMX.

Sam always figured he would gravitate toward coaching after his competitive career, being an analytical rider who obsessed over film and data, meticulously mapping out practice regimens, constantly tweaking body angles and shoulder positions and lines through corners.

Alise is the opposite. She shows up at the track. She practices hard. She goes home.

Sam, then, filled a void.

“The first 12 to 18 months was hard,” he says. “I went from every room I walked into, everyone looked at you like, you’re an athlete, you’re an Olympic athlete. Then, all of sudden, I was in a place where I didn’t like the person I saw back in the mirror. I was insecure. I just didn’t know what my purpose was.

“Getting into coaching and going on this journey together was a big part of lifting me back up and giving me reason to get up in the morning.”

They had talked about her retiring after Tokyo, about moving to Australia. She was 30 and had been racing for 24 years. She’s been to three Olympics. She had a silver medal and two world championships. Maybe it was time.

They changed their minds. They stayed in Chula Vista and began focusing on Paris, on the gold that eluded her in Tokyo.

Got back on the bike.

“At this point of my career, I don’t feel the need to prove anything,” Alise says. “I’ve achieved most everything that you can achieve within the sport. But I know I have more in me, there’s still more potential in there, and I’m chasing that.

“You have to find the silver lining. Honestly, Sam is my biggest motivation. He shows up every day. It’s unfair what happened, and he shows up and gets on with it. If he’s going to do that, I’m going to do that.”