Park City Teen Wins Third Straight National BMX Freestyle Championship

Samuel McKenzie dropped into the course at COR Park in South Jordan on March 27 and delivered the run that gave him a third consecutive national title. The 16-year-old Park City rider posted a 95.05 in his final pass to win the Amateur 14-18 category at the USA Cycling BMX Freestyle National Championships, the latest step in a three-year sequence that began with an Amateur 11-14 national title in 2024 and continued with a USA BMX Next Freestyle Amateur win in San Diego in 2025.

What that sequence actually required is worth mapping. McKenzie trains four days a week, splitting time between Woodward Park City and COR Park in South Jordan, the only Olympic-caliber BMX freestyle facility in Utah. COR Park is private. Its coaching staff is reserved for Olympic-level professional riders, which means McKenzie has trained on the same 18,000-square-foot, 34-foot-tall course used by Team USA Olympians, but without access to a dedicated coach. He is largely self-taught, building his trick vocabulary through YouTube and fellow riders. Woodward Park City, on Kilby Road, provides local training infrastructure and runs BMX summer camps for riders ages 7 to 17, but its features do not replicate the Olympic-specification setup at COR. For McKenzie, becoming a three-time national champion has meant absorbing the commute to South Jordan to access the course that Summit County does not yet have.

The sponsorship network that has kept him competitive reflects how thin that margin can be. COR Park, the Monster Army action sports platform, and Fuel, a Park City-based apparel brand built around the action sports market, back McKenzie's career. In January, USA Cycling added institutional weight, naming him one of seven riders selected to its new BMX freestyle development team, which also trains at COR Park.

That selection reframes what comes next. McKenzie will ride in the USA BMX Monster Recon Series this season in the 13-to-25 men's category, and his first World Cup start is scheduled for Birmingham, Alabama, in August. His stated long-term target is the 2028 or 2032 Olympics.

The civic dimension of that timeline is not trivial for Summit County. Woodward Park City already draws youth riders to its camps, and a development-team athlete with a documented Olympic trajectory gives local coaches and parents a concrete example of what the pipeline looks like from Park City to the national stage. Whether Summit County eventually invests in public, Olympic-specification BMX infrastructure will likely be shaped by how seriously local institutions treat McKenzie's run, not just as a feel-good story, but as evidence of what returns on early youth sports investment can look like for a community already known for producing Olympic-track talent in skiing and freestyle events.