A BMX History Library chapter · United Kingdom section

Shanaze Reade

Three BMX world titles, two track world titles, and the two Olympic finals that define how most people remember her

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

In March 2007 a teenager from Crewe who had been on a velodrome twice in her life lined up in a world championship final in Palma de Mallorca. She had six weeks of track training behind her. She was a late replacement for someone else. She and Victoria Pendleton won it in 33.631 seconds, and it was the first women's team sprint world title ever awarded.

Four months later she won the elite women's world championship in her actual sport. That is the shape of Shanaze Reade's career: an engine so far ahead of the field that she could borrow a second discipline and win at the top of it almost immediately. It is also a career with a hole in the middle of it, and the hole is Olympic-shaped.

Tipkinder Park

Shanaze Danielle Reade was born in Crewe on 23 September 1988. Before the bike there was athletics — five years of it, the 100 meters and the shot put — and by her own account she got bored of both. She started racing BMX in 1998, aged ten, on the track at Tipkinder Park in Crewe. A local track operator named Bob Field, whose own son raced, became her mentor.

What she had, from very early, was raw power. The way she built on it was unusual: she raced boys. Not occasionally, and not as a novelty. By 2005, at seventeen, she was riding the full British national series in the men's classes.

In a period interview she described it without much ceremony — she was usually in the top three against the men, she had been doing it for two years, most of them were fine about it, and the ones who were not amused her. In 2006 that approach produced something that still reads strangely on paper: she finished the season as British National number one in 19 and Over Elite Men. A woman, still a teenager, top of the men's national rankings.

The junior record

The age-group results behind that are extensive and they matter, because they show she was not a sudden arrival. Her junior record includes three world championship titles at age-group level, eight European titles and five British championships.

The landmarks inside it: a girls' national title in 2000 in her first years of racing, European age-group titles in 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, and in 2004 world titles in 16 Girls and in 18 and Under Women's Cruiser. In August 2006 she won the UCI BMX World Championships junior women's title in Brazil, riding on a foot she had broken in practice that June. The cast had come off four days before the European Championships earlier that summer.

2007: two disciplines in four months

Reade had taken up track cycling to stay fit for BMX. Her first velodrome competition was the Manchester round of the UCI Track Cycling World Cup on 24 February 2007, where she and Anna Blyth qualified fastest at 33.802 and took second in the team sprint final behind the Dutch pair of Yvonne Hijgenaar and Willy Kanis — Kanis, like Reade, a BMX racer. There was a false start in the final that Reade did not hear, so she rode a full flat-out lap for nothing and then had to do it again. She said afterward that her legs were burning halfway down the back straight the second time, and that she could never have dreamed of a silver medal in her first World Cup.

A month later, on 29 March 2007, she stood in for Anna Blyth at the UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Palma de Mallorca and won the women's team sprint world title with Victoria Pendleton in 33.631. It was the inaugural running of that world title. It was her second-ever track race.

In July 2007 she won the elite women's title at the UCI BMX World Championships — her first elite rainbow jersey, at Victoria in Canada. She added the elite women's European title the same year, and the elite women's UCI BMX Supercross World Cup series. That last one was decided at the Good Luck Beijing event on 22 August 2007, run on the Olympic track in Beijing exactly 362 days before Olympic BMX competition began there.

In November 2007 The Sunday Times named her its Young Sportswoman of the Year. She was nineteen.

2008: the double again, then Beijing

She repeated both. At the 2008 UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Manchester she and Pendleton won the team sprint again. At the 2008 UCI BMX World Championships in Taiyuan she defended her elite women's world title. On 9 July 2008 British Cycling named her the sole woman on the British Olympic BMX team.

Beijing 2008 was the first Olympic Games at which BMX racing was contested at all — a milestone in its own right, and one this library covers elsewhere through Erma Miller, who served as secretary commissaire for BMX at those Games. Reade went into it as the clear favourite for gold.

It went wrong in stages. She crashed in the first qualifying time trial heat, then set the second fastest time in the second heat, and because the better of the two counted she went through. The semi-finals were run over three heats on points. She crashed again in the first of them and still accumulated enough to reach the final.

In the final she rode the first berm conservatively and gave the lead to Anne-Caroline Chausson of France. Coming into the last berm she went for it, clipped Chausson's rear wheel, and went down. She did not finish. Chausson became the first Olympic women's BMX champion.

There is a version of that story that gets told as recklessness. The plainer reading is that she was the fastest woman in the world that year and she rode for the win rather than the podium, and on that day it cost her everything. She has never dressed it up as anything else.

2009 and 2010

On 16 March 2009 she was named in the British squad for the UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Pruszkow. She and Pendleton did not keep the team sprint title — they took silver, beaten by Anna Meares and Kaarle McCulloch of Australia. Her reaction to BBC Sport was matter-of-fact: she had done the best ride she could on the day and she was happy with it.

Injury kept her out of the 2009 BMX World Championships entirely. New Zealand's Sarah Walker won the elite women's title in her absence.

In 2010 she came back and took the elite women's title at the UCI BMX World Championships in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, dominating the final. It was her third elite BMX world title in four years. Walker finished second and Alise Post of the United States third.

London 2012

The second Games were supposed to be the correction. She rode the three-heat semi-final at the Olympic BMX track in Stratford and placed second, first and second — comfortably through, and riding well.

In the final she finished sixth. No crash, no drama, just a race that got away from her. Great Britain took no BMX medals at its own Olympic Games.

That is the whole Olympic record, and it is worth stating flatly because it is often stated wrongly: two Games, Beijing 2008 and London 2012, and no medal. She returned to the Great Britain track squad in April 2015 and rode for Madison Genesis through the 2015 to 2016 track season with Rio in mind, but she did not earn a place in the team for the 2016 Olympics.

After

She kept racing BMX at the top end for years after Beijing. In 2013 she won rounds one and two of the UCI BMX Supercross World Cup. She spent part of the following period based in the United States on the BMX circuit before the 2015 return to the track.

On 21 April 2017, aged twenty-eight, she announced her retirement from competitive cycling and took up an ambassadorial role at British Cycling. Iain Dyer, British Cycling's head coach, summed up the record in a way that has held up: being a world champion five times in two different cycling disciplines is no mean feat.

She came back once more. In August 2018 she returned to training at British Cycling after repeated invitations from performance director Stephen Park, and told Cycling Weekly in January 2019 that she was doing it for closure, treating the sport as a hobby and taking no funding for it. That month she won the British National Team Sprint Championship with Blaine Ridge-Davis. Days later a rule change requiring world championship riders to have raced that season's World Cup ruled her out of selection for the 2019 track worlds, and she retired for a second time.

Since then she has worked as a fitness coach, served as West Midlands cycling and walking ambassador, joined the board of the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships in Glasgow as a co-opted director in 2020, and was announced as an ambassador for those championships in June 2021.

Where the record runs thin

Timeline

• 23 September 1988 — born in Crewe, Cheshire.
• 1998 — starts racing BMX aged ten at Tipkinder Park, Crewe.
• 2004 — world titles in 16 Girls and 18 and Under Women's Cruiser; European title in 16 Girls.
• 2005 — races the full British national series against men at seventeen.
• 1 April 2006 — first professional win, Girls Pro at the ABA Winternationals, Phoenix, Arizona. Wins again the following day.
• August 2006 — UCI BMX World Championships junior women's title, Brazil. Finishes the year as British National number one, 19 and Over Elite Men.
• 24 February 2007 — first velodrome competition. Team sprint silver at the Manchester World Cup round with Anna Blyth.
• 29 March 2007 — UCI track world title, women's team sprint, Palma de Mallorca, with Victoria Pendleton, 33.631. The first time that world title was awarded.
• July 2007 — elite women's UCI BMX world champion, Victoria, Canada. Also elite European champion and Supercross World Cup champion that year.
• 20 November 2007 — named The Sunday Times Young Sportswoman of the Year.
• March 2008 — second UCI track world title, team sprint, Manchester, with Pendleton.
• June 2008 — defends the elite women's UCI BMX world title at Taiyuan, China.
• 9 July 2008 — named to the British Olympic BMX team, the only woman selected.
• 22 August 2008 — crashes on the final berm of the first Olympic women's BMX final, Beijing. Does not finish. Anne-Caroline Chausson wins.
• March 2009 — team sprint silver at the track world championships, Pruszkow, behind Meares and McCulloch.
• July 2010 — third elite UCI BMX world title, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa.
• 10 August 2012 — sixth in the Olympic women's BMX final, London.
• 2013 — wins rounds one and two of the UCI BMX Supercross World Cup.
• April 2015 — rejoins the Great Britain track squad. Signs with Madison Genesis for the 2015 to 2016 track season.
• 21 April 2017 — announces retirement, aged twenty-eight.
• January 2019 — wins the British National Team Sprint Championship with Blaine Ridge-Davis, then retires a second time.

Where this sits in the bigger story

Reade is the second British rider in this library to win a BMX world title and then go to the velodrome and win there too. Jamie Staff, out of Kent, did it first, and took Olympic gold in the team sprint at Beijing 2008 — the same Games at which Reade crashed out of the BMX final. Two riders from the same small British BMX scene, at the same Olympics, one leaving with gold from a borrowed discipline and one leaving with nothing from her own. Reade has been open about following Staff's example onto the track.

The other thread runs forward. Britain won its first Olympic BMX racing medals on 30 July 2021 in Tokyo, when Bethany Shriever took gold in the women's race and Kye Whyte took silver in the men's on the same morning. Every one of those riders came up in a British BMX scene that Reade had already proved could produce world champions. She was the proof of concept. She never got the medal, and the two who did came along a decade later.

That is not a tragedy. It is how sport usually works, and Reade's five rainbow jerseys are on the record whatever happened in two finals.

Sources

BBC Sport, "BMX and track world champion Shanaze Reade retires from cycling," 21 April 2017 — five world titles across two disciplines, the back-to-back team sprint titles with Victoria Pendleton in 2007 and 2008, elite BMX gold in both those years plus a third in 2010, the 2009 team sprint defeat to Kaarle McCulloch and Anna Meares, her return to the track in 2015 and her failure to earn a place at Rio 2016, competition at Beijing and London only, and Iain Dyer's assessment. BBC Sport, "Shanaze Reade crowned BMX world champion for third time," July 2010. BBC Sport, "Reade crashes out of BMX medals," 22 August 2008. BBC Sport, "National Track Championships: Reade wins first British title," 28 January 2019. Cycling Weekly, "Shanaze Reade wins third BMX world title" — the Pietermaritzburg final, Sarah Walker second, Alise Post third, and the 2009 Worlds missed through injury. Cycling Weekly, "Shanaze Reade returns to Great Britain's track team," 13 April 2015, and "Shanaze Reade joins Madison Genesis," 5 August 2015, and Vern Pitt, "It's about closure," 28 January 2019. The Guardian, "London 2012: Shanaze Reade misses out again as GB fail in BMX finals," 10 August 2012 — the semi-final placings and the sixth in the final. British Cycling event reports, including the Manchester UCI Track World Cup report of 24 February 2007 by Phil Ingham and the BMX National Series round six report of 14 August 2006. Reuters, 3 April 2007, and cyclingnews.com interview with Reade by Shane Stokes, 27 April 2007 — the Palma de Mallorca team sprint and the last-minute replacement of Anna Blyth. UK Sport, "Shanaze Reade defends world BMX title," 2 June 2008. cyclingnews.com, "Great Britain names strong Olympic squad," 9 July 2008. The Times, Andrew Longmore, "Shanaze Reade, pedalling to Beijing," 23 March 2008 — Tipkinder Park, 1998, and Bob Field. Descent World interview by Si Paton, 2005 — racing the men's national series. Wikipedia, "Shanaze Reade," for date and place of birth, the age-group and junior title lists, the 2013 Supercross World Cup round wins and the 2019 British team sprint title, drawing on the sources above.

Checked and unreachable at the time of research: bmxsociety.com and bmxmuseum.com.

Last reviewed: August 2026.