Argentina's Jose Torres Gil and China's Yawen Deng won gold medals in the men's and women's BMX freestyle park competitions at the Paris Olympics in the Urban Park at Place de la Concorde after a thrilling afternoon of action.

British star and Glasgow 2023 men's world champion Kieran Riley, despite his loss, improved his score to 93.91 in the final run to take the silver medal behind Torres Gil. In the women's competition, Peris Venegas took the silver medal with a big score of 90.70 on her second run.

Argentina's Torres Gil had a monster winning score of 94.82 on just his third run of the entire men's competition. The seventh-highest score out of nine in the qualifying rounds from Tuesday, he stepped through a series of huge tricks and transfers to wow the Paris crowd and judges and take the gold medal.

"I am very happy. I came here to participate in the biggest event in the world, the Olympics. I'm very impressed. I didn't expect to get a high score from the first round, so I'm very happy," said Torres Gil (UCI). I want to thank all the spectators. They cheered a lot for the riders from the U.S. and Europe. All the work I did was to make sure everyone could enjoy our sport."

In the women's freestyle final, Deng went into her second run confident that she had at least won a medal with her top score from the first of two runs, where only the best score counted, rather than the two-run average as in Tuesday's qualifying.

The 18-year-old Chinese rider showed great consistency, increasing his score slightly from 92.50 to 92.60 points. However, with five-time world champion and Tokyo silver medalist Hannah Roberts (USA) waiting in the wings, the gold medal was not in doubt.

Roberts chased Deng in the first run as the top qualifier, but crashed hard in the last 10 seconds after failing a front flip.

Under pressure as the last rider of the day, Roberts failed a backflip on the first hit-up of his second run and slipped off his pedals on landing, shattering his Olympic dream. He fell short of the 88.80 points needed for the bronze medal.

"Coming out on top in the first run gave me the confidence to improve my performance in the second run. If I do all my tricks well, the final score won't be bad," said Deng, who didn't want to get carried away thinking about Los Angeles in 2028.

"I haven't thought that far ahead yet. I just want to take it one race at a time."

In third place for the women was an ecstatic Natalya Deem of Australia.

In the men's competition, French hope Anthony Jeanjean recovered from a fall after the first trick of the first run to finish in the medal standings with a double backflip, eventually taking bronze behind Torres Gil and Riley.

Defending Tokyo Olympics men's champion Logan Martin of Australia finished ninth, while China's Sun Jiaqi finished seventh after failing to skate cleanly after qualifying in third place.

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