What did Jill Kintner win at the Olympics?

She won the bronze medal in the women's BMX race at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, contested on 22 August 2008 at the Laoshan BMX Field. Her time was 38.674. Anne-Caroline Chausson of France won the gold in 35.976 and her teammate Laetitia Le Corguille the silver in 38.042. It was the first Olympic BMX competition ever held, and Kintner's was the first Olympic BMX medal won by an American woman.

Who was on the first United States Olympic BMX team?

Four riders: Mike Day, Donny Robinson and Kyle Bennett in the men's race, and Jill Kintner in the women's. All four went to Beijing in 2008 for the sport's Olympic debut, and three of them came home with medals. The National BMX Hall of Fame inducted all four together in 2012 as Special Recognition honorees, under the heading of the 2008 United States Olympic BMX Team.

How many world titles does Jill Kintner have, and in what?

Three UCI world titles, all of them in four-cross on a mountain bike, won in 2005, 2006 and 2007 at the UCI Mountain Bike and Trials World Championships. She has six world championship medals in that discipline in total, adding a bronze in 2003 and silvers in 2004 and 2009. In BMX her world championship medal is a bronze in the junior women's class in 1998, and she won a UCI BMX World Challenge title in the 16 Girls class in 1997. She never won a UCI elite BMX world title. Her 2002 Pro Girls world championship was an American Bicycle Association title, which is a sanction championship and not a UCI one.

Where is Jill Kintner from?

Washington State. She was born on 24 October 1981 and grew up in the Seattle area, with sources naming Burien, Seattle and Kirkland at different points. Her father ran a BMX track in Washington. She started riding BMX in July 1989, aged seven, and now lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Is Jill Kintner still riding?

Yes. She is living and active in the sport. She rides for Pivot Cycles as an athlete and ambassador, coaches with the United States national team program, mentors younger riders, runs her own event called Hot Laps, and works as an illustrator and designer.

A BMX History Library chapter · United States section

Jill Kintner

A Washington seven-year-old on her father's track, a bronze medal in the first Olympic BMX race ever run, and a second career that made her a world champion in a different sport

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

BMX had waited its whole life for the Olympic Games. Thirty-eight years after kids in Long Beach started copying motocross on Schwinns, the sport finally got a gate at Laoshan in Beijing, and the United States sent four riders. Three of them came home with medals. One of the three was a woman from Washington State who had quit BMX four years earlier, become the best four-cross mountain bike racer in the world instead, and only come back because somebody phoned her up and told her the Olympics were coming.

Her name is Jill Kintner, and she raced the Olympic final in a leg brace.

At a glance. Born 24 October 1981 · From the Seattle area, Washington; now Bellingham, Washington · Started BMX July 1989, aged seven · Turned pro 1995, aged 14 · Olympic bronze, women's BMX racing, Beijing 2008, raced 22 August · UCI world titles three, all in mountain bike four-cross — 2005, 2006, 2007 · UCI BMX Worlds medal bronze, junior women, 1998 · Hall of Fame National BMX Hall of Fame, 2012, with the 2008 United States Olympic BMX Team · Teams the Bike Factory, Red Bull, Norco, Pivot Cycles

A track in the family

Jill Kintner was born on 24 October 1981 and grew up in the Puget Sound area of Washington State. The detail that explains the rest of it is that her father owned a BMX track. She did not have to be taken to the sport. It was in the yard.

She started riding in July 1989, aged seven. Her name first shows up in the Washington district points tables that autumn. Her first national-level race was the American Bicycle Association's Great Northwest Nationals at Sumner, Washington, on 17 August 1990, in the combined 7–8 Girls class. She won on Saturday and she won again on Sunday. She was eight years old.

Her first sponsor arrived the same year, from a shop called the Bike Factory. She turned professional in 1995, at fourteen.

The amateur record

What followed was the standard American amateur ladder, climbed quickly. Between 1990 and 1996 she took ABA titles at Gold Cup West, the Race of Champions, the US Open West, the Washington state championship and the Grand Nationals, moving up an age class every year or two. Two of those are Grand National titles — the 14–16 Girls Cruiser class in 1995 and the 13 Girls class in 1996.

In 1997 she won the 16 Girls World Challenge title at the UCI BMX World Championships. The Challenge is the age-class competition that runs alongside the Championship classes at the same event, and it is not the elite rainbow jersey. In 1998 she took a bronze medal in the junior women's class at the World Championships. That bronze is, to this day, her only medal at a UCI BMX World Championships.

Pro, and then gone

She raced the national circuit as a professional through the late nineties and into the 2000s while studying design — first at RIT in New York, then at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco — and eventually put school on hold to ride.

2002 was her best BMX season. She took the NBL Pro Girl national number one plate, and in the ABA she won the Pro Girls Race of Champions, took the Pro Girls world championship and finished national number three. Contemporary accounts credit her with more than seventy career BMX wins.

Then she stopped. She was twenty-two, she had won most of what American BMX had to offer a woman in 2004, and by her own account she was bored and felt she had hit her ceiling. She rode her last regular BMX races in the spring of 2004 and went to the mountains.

Six kinds of championship, kept apart. This is the page in the library where the categories matter most, because Jill Kintner has titles in more than one sport and they get mashed together constantly. An Olympic medal is the Games — hers is a bronze in BMX racing at Beijing 2008. A UCI world title is a rainbow jersey at a UCI World Championships, and hers are three, all in mountain bike four-cross, at the UCI Mountain Bike and Trials World Championships. Her UCI BMX Worlds record is different again: a junior women's bronze in 1998, and a 1997 title in the World Challenge, which is the age-class competition, not the Championship class. A sanction world championship is a third thing — the ABA crowned its own Pro Girls world champion in 2002, and that is an ABA title, not a UCI one. A national title is a national title, whether ABA, NBL or USA Cycling. And a series or festival championship, like Queen of Crankworx, is a season standing, not a world championship. She has all six. None of them is a substitute for another.

Four-cross, and a rainbow jersey after all

Four-cross was BMX for grown-ups on a hillside: four riders, one dirt course, gates at the top, first to the bottom. The UCI made it a world championship discipline in 2003. A racer who had spent fifteen years learning to leave a start gate and hold an inside line was going to be very hard to beat at it.

She had been riding mountain bikes part-time since 1997. Once she committed, the results came in a straight line. Bronze at the 2003 World Championships. Silver in 2004. Gold in 2005, 2006 and 2007. Five consecutive world championship medals, then a sixth — a silver — when she came back to the discipline in 2009. She also won the overall four-cross World Cup twice and stacked up World Cup race wins in double figures.

Those three golds are the only UCI world titles she holds, and they are mountain bike titles. This library is a BMX library and leads with BMX, but leaving out the four-cross years would misrepresent who she is. They are the reason she was in the shape she was in when BMX came calling again.

Mike King makes a phone call

In 2006 the International Olympic Committee had already confirmed that BMX racing would be on the program in Beijing. Mike King — former Torker and GT racer, then BMX director at USA Cycling — got in touch and told Kintner she should come back.

She returned in early 2007, at first as training for four-cross, and won her first race back on her first attempt. At the Olympic test event on the Beijing track in August 2007 she finished fifth. By then it was no longer a side project, and she moved to BMX full time, relocating to San Diego to train as a resident athlete at the United States Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, where USA Cycling had built a copy of the Beijing track.

The body did not cooperate. She ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee in a crash in December 2007. She hurt the same knee again in training in late April 2008. On 4 May 2008 she had surgery to repair the meniscus. The full reconstruction the knee actually needed would have ended her season, so she put it off, strapped on a leg brace and kept racing.

On 2 June 2008, at the UCI BMX World Championships in Taiyuan, China, she finished sixth out of a field of thirty-two. That result took the single automatic women's Olympic place available to the United States. She was going to Beijing.

Beijing, 22 August 2008

The women's BMX competition at the Laoshan BMX Field ran across 20 to 22 August 2008. It was the first Olympic BMX competition ever held, for anybody, and there were exactly six medals in the sport on the table — three men's, three women's.

In the final, a crash early on took two riders off the ramp. Anne-Caroline Chausson of France came through it and won the gold in 35.976. Her teammate Laetitia Le Corguille took silver in 38.042. Jill Kintner took the bronze in 38.674, holding off Sarah Walker of New Zealand to the line.

It was the first Olympic BMX medal ever won by an American woman, and there has never been an earlier one available. She had the reconstructive surgery on 2 October 2008, six weeks after the medal.

The first United States Olympic BMX team

The team that went to Beijing had four riders on it. Mike Day, Donny Robinson and Kyle Bennett raced the men's event; Kintner raced the women's. The four of them came in by different routes and on different dates. Bennett clinched the first automatic place on 10 May 2008 as the highest-ranked American across USA Cycling's year-long qualifying series. Kintner took the women's place on 2 June at the World Championships in Taiyuan. Day won the Team Trials at Chula Vista on 14 June. Robinson, second at those Trials, was named to the roster on 25 June by team coach Mike King. Because the men's places and the single women's place were settled in separate competitions, hers is the name that most often falls out of the telling.

It should not. Day won silver, Robinson won bronze and Kintner won bronze, and the United States took three of the six BMX medals awarded at those Games. In 2012 the National BMX Hall of Fame inducted all four riders together as Special Recognition honorees, under the heading of the 2008 United States Olympic BMX Team, at a ceremony held at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista on 16 June. The Hall's own citation names Day, Robinson, Bennett and Kintner, in that order, and calls them the first US Olympic BMX team. Four names, one plaque.

The long second act

She never really came back to BMX after Beijing. She went back to the mountain, took the 2009 four-cross world silver, and then moved into downhill from 2010 — a discipline she had no background in at all, and in which she went on to take World Cup podiums and race four world championships.

What she became better known for outside racing circles was Crankworx, the mountain bike festival series, where the overall title across the disciplines is called Queen of Crankworx. She has won it five times. Her own career ledger counts forty-five Crankworx gold medals, eleven Crankworx pump track titles, two pump track world championships, twenty-five elite United States national championships across all the disciplines she has entered, twenty-five Sea Otter Classic wins, six US Open titles, Enduro World Series stage wins and two North American Enduro Cup championships. She was given the Crankworx Spirit Award in 2018.

Six disciplines — BMX, four-cross, dual slalom, downhill, pump track and enduro — and a top-three world ranking in every one of them. There are not many riders in the history of cycling who can say that, and there is nobody else who did it starting from a BMX gate at seven years old on their dad's track.

What she does now

Kintner lives in Bellingham, Washington. She rides for Pivot Cycles as an athlete and ambassador, and is still competing. She coaches — as a certified skills instructor, with the United States national team program, and informally with younger riders — and she runs her own event, called Hot Laps.

She also draws. The design training she paused in 1999 turned into a working second trade: helmet graphics, jersey designs, enamel pins, illustrated van wraps, event branding, and an animated short called Bandit Hill built out of her own helmet artwork. She designed her own website. It is not a hobby bolted onto the racing; the two have run together for twenty years.

Where the record runs thin

Which town to name. The record is not consistent. Encyclopedia sourcing gives Burien, Washington, citing the Seattle Times. Team USA's athlete profile and her own website both say Seattle. Contemporary Seattle Post-Intelligencer coverage of the Beijing medal called her a Juanita rider, which is Kirkland, and her own career list includes a Hometown Hero honor from the City of Kirkland. We say the Seattle area and leave it there rather than pick one.
The 1998 world championship result. Encyclopedia sourcing records a bronze in the junior women's class. Team USA's medal table records a 1998 bronze listed as Individual — Women. Separately, Team USA's written bio calls her a BMX junior world champion at sixteen, which matches neither and most likely refers to the 1997 World Challenge title in the 16 Girls class. We have recorded the bronze and the Challenge title and have not tried to reconcile the third description.
Four-cross World Cup race wins. Team USA counts thirteen. Her own site counts fifteen. Both are plausible depending on what is included. We have not resolved it and so this page says double figures rather than a number.
The pump track world titles. Her career list records two pump track world championships. Which body sanctioned them, and in which years, is not established here. They are not UCI mountain bike four-cross titles and are not counted among the three.
The date of the Olympic bronze. One widely copied encyclopedia line gives 19 August 2008. The Olympic competition record and contemporary Seattle reporting both put the women's final on 22 August 2008, and that is the date used here.
The first sponsorship and turning pro. The Bike Factory sponsorship in 1990 and turning professional at fourteen in 1995 are carried in encyclopedia sourcing without a citation attached. They are consistent with everything else on the record but they are not independently confirmed here.
The sponsor chronology between 1995 and 2012. Her BMX-era team and sponsor history is not documented in anything we reached. Norco is confirmed from January 2012, Red Bull across the Olympic years and after, and Pivot Cycles currently. The years in between are a gap.
Whether she has formally retired from racing. She has not announced a retirement in anything we found, and her current team describes her as still competing. This page does not call her a former racer.

Timeline

24 October 1981 — born. Grows up in the Seattle area of Washington State; her father runs a BMX track.
July 1989 — starts riding BMX, aged seven.
17 August 1990 — first national race, the ABA Great Northwest Nationals at Sumner, Washington. Wins both days in the 7–8 Girls class. First sponsorship, from the Bike Factory, the same year.
1990–1996 — ABA age-class titles at Gold Cup West, the Race of Champions, the US Open West, Washington state and the Grand Nationals.
1995 — turns professional at fourteen.
1997 — 16 Girls World Challenge champion at the UCI BMX World Championships.
1998 — bronze, junior women, UCI BMX World Championships.
2002 — NBL Pro Girl national number one; ABA Pro Girls Race of Champions winner, ABA Pro Girls world champion and ABA national number three.
2003 — bronze, women's four-cross, UCI Mountain Bike World Championships. US national mountain cross champion.
spring 2004 — stops racing BMX regularly at twenty-two and moves to mountain biking full time. Four-cross world silver that season.
2005 — four-cross world champion. Repeats in 2006 and 2007. Three straight rainbow jerseys.
2007 — returns to BMX at Mike King's urging and wins her first race back. Fifth at the Beijing Olympic test event in August. Wins the four-cross World Cup overall.
December 2007 — ruptures her anterior cruciate ligament in a crash.
4 May 2008 — meniscus surgery. Delays the full reconstruction and races the season in a brace.
2 June 2008 — sixth at the UCI BMX World Championships in Taiyuan, China, taking the lone automatic United States women's Olympic place.
14 June 2008 — Mike Day wins the Team Trials at Chula Vista.
25 June 2008 — Donny Robinson is named to the roster by team coach Mike King. With Kyle Bennett, who had clinched the first place on 10 May, and Kintner, the first United States Olympic BMX team is complete at four riders.
22 August 2008 — Olympic bronze, women's BMX racing, Laoshan BMX Field, Beijing, in 38.674, behind Anne-Caroline Chausson and Laetitia Le Corguille. The first Olympic BMX competition ever held. The United States takes three of the six BMX medals at the Games.
2 October 2008 — has the knee reconstruction she had postponed.
2009 — silver, women's four-cross, World Championships. Sixth and last four-cross Worlds medal.
2010 — moves into downhill. Races the Downhill World Championships in 2010, 2013, 2014 and 2015, and takes five UCI World Cup downhill podiums.
January 2012 — joins the Norco World Team.
16 June 2012 — inducted into the National BMX Hall of Fame at the Olympic Training Center, Chula Vista, alongside Mike Day, Donny Robinson and Kyle Bennett, as the 2008 United States Olympic BMX Team.
2018 — Crankworx Spirit Award.
2025–2026 — racing and coaching with Pivot Cycles out of Bellingham, Washington, and running her own Hot Laps event.

Where this sits in the bigger story

Every chapter in this library that touches the Olympics runs through one morning in Beijing. Maris Strombergs of Latvia won the first Olympic BMX gold. Mike Day took the first Olympic BMX silver in the same race and Donny Robinson the first bronze. Erma Miller was working the event as secretary commissaire for the discipline. And in the women's race, on the same track, Jill Kintner won the medal that made the American haul three from six.

The part worth sitting with is how she got there. American BMX in the nineties gave a girl from Washington a full ladder to climb — district plates, Gold Cup, the Race of Champions, the Grand Nationals, a pro class — and she climbed all of it and then found there was nowhere else to go. So she left, invented a second career in a sport that barely existed yet, and won three world titles in it. When BMX finally became big enough to need her back, she was two months short of her twenty-seventh birthday, racing on a knee that needed rebuilding, and she was still fast enough to podium at the Olympic Games.

That is not a story about talent. It is a story about what a sport loses when it runs out of room for its best riders, and what it gets back when it builds more.

Sources

Team USA, United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee athlete profile, "Jill Kintner" — the Beijing 2008 bronze, the full world championships medal ledger of seven medals across BMX and four-cross with years and colors, the years of participation in downhill, four-cross and individual BMX, the education at the California College of the Arts, the resident-athlete status at the Chula Vista Olympic Training Center on the replica Beijing track, the fifth place at the 2007 Beijing test event, the count of thirteen four-cross World Cup wins and two overall World Cup titles, the three straight four-cross world titles from 2005 to 2007, and the figure of more than seventy career BMX victories. Wikipedia, "Jill Kintner" — date of birth, Burien and the family BMX track, starting to ride in July 1989 aged seven, the first national win at the ABA Great Northwest Nationals in Sumner on 17 August 1990, the Bike Factory sponsorship and turning pro at fourteen, the full ABA, NBL and UCI amateur and professional title list including the 1997 16 Girls World Challenge title and the 1998 junior women's bronze, Mike King's 2006 approach and the 2007 comeback, the sixth place at Taiyuan on 2 June 2008 that took the automatic women's Olympic place, the December 2007 ACL rupture, the April 2008 re-injury, the 4 May 2008 meniscus surgery, the leg brace, the 2 October 2008 reconstruction, the four-cross world championship medals from 2003 to 2009, the US national mountain cross titles and the Jeep King of the Mountain titles, and the January 2012 move to the Norco World Team — drawing on the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the New York Times, VeloNews, Bike magazine, NBC Olympics, American BMXer, BMX Plus! and Moto Mag. USA BMX, "National BMX Hall of Fame 2012 Inductees Announced," 10 May 2012 — the Special Recognition induction of the first USA Olympic BMX Team, naming Mike Day, Donny Robinson, Kyle Bennett and Jill Kintner as all four of its members, the ceremony at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista on 16 June 2012, and the statement that Team USA captured three of the six available medals at Beijing. Legend Bike Co's own Kyle Bennett and Donny Robinson chapters — the 10 May, 14 June and 25 June 2008 selection sequence and Mike King's discretionary pick. Olympic competition records for the women's BMX event at the 2008 Summer Olympics — the 20 to 22 August schedule at the Laoshan BMX Field, the crash in the final, and the finishing times of 35.976 for Anne-Caroline Chausson, 38.042 for Laetitia Le Corguille and 38.674 for Kintner ahead of Sarah Walker. Jill Kintner's own website, jillkintner.com — the Bellingham residence, the six disciplines, the career highlight list including five Queen of Crankworx titles, forty-five Crankworx golds, eleven Crankworx pump track titles, two pump track world championships, twenty-five elite United States national championships, twenty-five Sea Otter Classic wins, six US Open titles, Enduro World Series stage wins, two North American Enduro Cup titles, five UCI downhill World Cup podiums, the 2018 Crankworx Spirit Award, the Kirkland hometown honor, the RIT and CCA design studies, and the illustration and design work including Bandit Hill. Pivot Cycles athlete page, "Jill Kintner," 2026 — her current team, the Bellingham base, and the description of her competing, coaching the United States national team, mentoring younger riders and running Hot Laps.

Checked and unavailable at the time of research: bmxmuseum.com, which blocks automated retrieval, and bmxsociety.com, which did not respond.

Last reviewed: August 2026. Jill Kintner is living and is still riding and competing. This chapter covers her sporting record only, and will be updated as that record grows.

Country/region