Meet the world-beating, BMX flipping, bricklayer with renewed Olympic hopes

It was as a bricklayer that Jude Jones laid the foundations for a world-beating career as a BMX freestyle rider.

But it was when he parked his bike that he realised how much he wanted to build on what he feared were crumbling dreams of sporting glory.

Within months of nearly quitting the sport in 2022, he won his first national championship.

Three years later and the 24-year-old claimed his first World Cup title in Japan when he led home a British one-two ahead of Jordan Clark in December.

"To win a World Cup was my dream, it meant everything and took everything in me to get it," he told BBC East Midlands Today.

"This should be a story for people to just keep going. If you've left school, don't know what you are doing and things aren't working out, it doesn't mean you can never achieve your dream.

"I'd completely written off riding ever again. I could have sold my BMX. I was 21 and remember thinking I was too old, that there was no point because it all progressed without me and I'd never get there.

"If someone told me that you'd be winning a World Cup event, go to World Championships and be a two-time national champion I'd never have believed it."

Jones' early sporting career was a hectic balancing act, working with trowel in hand during the the day before getting his helmet and pads on to head straight to the skatepark after work to train into the night.

He recalls it being an exhausting routine in which days blurred into one another with endless 6am starts and 9pm finishes.

While Jones' BMX-flipping bricklaying double life was a constant juggle, he was nowhere near a building site or his bike when he had a career-defining epiphany.

"I was actually on holiday with a few friends when I looked around and thought 'I used to have this thing that made me who I am'. I felt like I lost that and was just like everyone else," he said.

"In that moment I wanted to get home and on the bike. And it wasn't for any reason other than I wanted to get that identity back."

Jones is quick to point out that he still holds his bricklaying qualifications, although he has not put them to practical use for a few years now.

A run of title wins on the domestic and global stage has allowed the rider from the Leicestershire town of Market Harborough become a full-time athlete.

"I'm so lucky to be able to just focus on riding now," he said.

A sixth-placed finish at the 2023 World Championships, coupled with a gold medal at the Madrid Urban Sports contest in the same year, earned him a place on British Cycling's podium programme, which is dedicated to supporting elite riders targeting medals in European, World and Olympic championships.

He fell short of his Olympic ambitions in 2024, missing out on a place at the Paris Games by just one qualifying point.

Jones says he accepted the near miss as "part of the sport" and not something he could afford to "dwell on" despite it being "a tough pill to swallow."

"I just picked myself up again," he added.

"I just did all I knew, which was get back on the bike and go back down to the skatepark again. It's what keeps me going."

For the first time since that Olympic near-miss, he can this year start accumulating qualifying points for the Los Angeles Games in 2028.

"This time I feel like I owe it to my past self to go and get there this time," he said.