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BMX racing is one of the most frenetically entertaining sports around.
Eight riders at a time throw themselves down an eight-metre-high ramp on BMX bikes where, amidst a tangle of pointed elbows, pumping legs and spinning tyres, all eight look to find the best line around the first of three 180-degree corners.
It's thrilling. It's frantic. It's chaotic.
And it's incredibly dangerous, something Australia's Saya Sakakibara, who spent a year after crashing out in Tokyo suffering from lingering concussion symptoms, understands with tragic clarity.
So it might come as a surprise to hear the 25-year-old talk of calmness ahead of the Brisbane leg of the World Cup, which takes place on Saturday.
"I think that calm emotion is probably the most powerful," defending World Cup winner Sakakibara said.
"If you think of every situation that you can put yourself in, whether it's in a BMX race or a relationship, whatever, calm is the most powerful way you can change your emotion to where you need to go.
"I think that's something that I've been focusing on this year, to bring that sense of calmness — switching off between races to make sure that I'm bringing that calm so when it's time I can switch on and get into that hungry emotion, or angry emotion to switch on."
It's obviously working.
Sakakibara won both this year's opening World Cup events in Rotorua a fortnight ago, beating her closest World Cup rivals — defending world champion, Britain's Bethany Shriever and Dutchwoman Laura Smulders, who broke her collarbone in a crash during the second of the two Rotorua rounds,
Olympic champion from Tokyo, Shriever and veteran Smulders finished second and third on the World Cup circuit in 2023 and are big threats ahead of Paris 2024.
With just two more stops on this year's World Cup tour — Brisbane on Saturday and Sunday, followed by Tulsa in the USA at the end of April, which will be followed by the World Championships in South Carolina in May — every race counts, particularly with the Olympics looming large.
"It's actually quite hard [to describe]," Sakakibara said of how things change in the lead up the the Games.
"I feel like I haven't experienced enough to feel that change in emotion coming close to the Olympics.
"In 2020, my build up to that Olympics was totally different to everyone else on the circuit I think, and it was my first experience so I didn't know what to expect either."
You could say that again.
The year the Tokyo Games had been scheduled, just before COVID put a full stop on all sporting competition in 2020, Saya's brother Kai suffered a horrific accident at the supercross world championships in Bathurst.
That crash left Kai in a coma for two months, in hospital for eight months, and off the bike — competitively — for life.
It was an accident that highlights the absurd cruelty of this sport, where everything can change in an instant.
Reigning men's world champion, Frenchman Romain Mahieu, summed it up best.
"You can be the best in the world, but then …," he tails off.
Three-time Olympian Lauren Reynolds also understands the brutality of the sport in which everything can change in an instant.
"It's a very cutthroat sport," Reynolds, who equalled the best finish by an Australian woman at an Olympic Games with fifth in Tokyo, said.
"It's over very quickly. Things can change very quickly."
One crash, one mistake, can sway from having the relatively trivial effect of missing out on a podium place, right though to being life-changing.
It's fair to say that Saya's preparation for the delayed Tokyo Games was far from ideal.
But then, her experience in Tokyo was also not what she would have hoped for either.
In the semifinals, Saya crashed heavily, leaving Australia and the entire BMX community with their hearts, still heavy from the trauma of Kai's accident, in their mouths.
That she fell after contact with American Alise Willoughby — whose own career had been impacted by such similar tragedy that impacted her husband, Sam Willoughby, who was left paralysed by a crash soon after the Rio Olympics — was a cruel irony.
The concussion she suffered in that incident was compounded by repeated issues over the next 12 months, leading the Gold Coast-born athlete to give pause to thoughts of continuing her career as she dealt with the mental scars, as well as the physical ones.
However, Sakakibara returned to the sport in 2023 with renewed vigour, winning the 2023 World Cup title and crediting her brother as a "huge part" of her journey, a journey which she says means "nothing" without his presence.
"The way that he has been supportive of me in my journey has probably been the biggest [thing]," she said.
"Because he had to give up his dream of going to the Olympics for BMX … BMX was everything for him.
"But for him to now support me with no guilt, no jealousy, it's probably the biggest thing."
While Kai is aiming for his own fairytale sporting comeback through para-rowing, with LA 2028 in his sights, the racers he left behind on the BMX track are eyeing off the Olympics in Paris later this year.
World champion Mahieu, who is based in Australia with Sakakibara and leads a stellar pack of French riders shooting for gold on home soil, is not letting the burden of the world champion's rainbow jersey weigh him down.
"One of my dreams was to be an Olympian [which I did in Tokyo]," he said.
"But now I have the opportunity to do the same thing in my own country.
"It's a bit different, but maybe I will feel less pressure, because it's an environment that I know.
"The preparation doesn't change. I feel like [I am] going there with more confidence than Tokyo."
Sakakibara, who said she was excited to race a World Cup event on home soil for the first time since 2020, in front of a close-to-sold out crowd in Brisbane, echoed those thoughts.
"That's what I've been training for," Sakakibara said of the Olympics.
"Everyone has a goal to make it to the Olympics and be an Olympian, and then to have another opportunity to go again you always want to go better than what you did before.
"To be honest, I feel like every time I turn up to a race it's a new challenge and I'm coming into it with its own feelings and emotions … and I'm facing those challenges as they come.
"I've been able to unlock that momentum coming into the back end of last year and have been able to carry it through."
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