The 2026 Worlds in Brisbane showed how much can hinge on a venue and a schedule when the weather turns.
For 2027, the host has just settled a long-running question over its BMX track, moving the event from Annecy to Scionzier, and now has ten months to get it ready.
By Steve Williams, The Burm
When the wind came in off the coast at the Sleeman Sports Complex on the Sunday of the 2026 Worlds, it didn’t just cancel a day of racing. It showed how little slack a BMX World Championships has when the weather turns.
Persistent gusts made the eight-metre start hill unsafe, and the UCI called the finals off. In the governing body’s own words, the safety of everyone at the venue “remains the UCI’s highest priority”, and few would argue with that. The hard part came next. With no contingency day in the schedule and no room to reschedule, six world titles were settled on the strength of Saturday’s racing, under UCI regulation 6.1.038 bis, which lets the last completed round stand as the result.
Jesse Asmus took the elite men’s rainbow jersey without a final being run, and Saya Sakakibara, an Olympic champion racing on home soil, took silver in a women’s elite final that never happened. Six rainbow jerseys, and not one settled by a gate dropping on a final.
The reaction from riders was strong. Two-time world and Olympic champion Māris Štrombergs called the outcome “a disgrace to this sport.”
The Burm understands the picture on the day was more difficult than the official statement suggests. According to coaches who were in Brisbane, the call at around 9am was to run the racing off the reduced five-metre start hill. Coaches and riders raised concerns almost immediately, and understandably so: a world title decided off the 5m is a long way from the one they’d trained for. But that left the organisers with two hard options, racing in gusts reported at around 50mph, or not racing at all. Neither was a good answer, and that was the heart of it.
Two things can be true at once. Cancelling was almost certainly the right safety decision on the day. And the sport was still left with a set of world champions crowned without a final. The weather was unavoidable; what made it bite was the lack of a spare day to fall back on.
In fairness, rescheduling a Worlds is far harder than hindsight makes it look. Flights are booked, television windows are sold around the world months ahead, tickets are gone, and staff are contracted for specific days. Those are real constraints. But they are also the argument for building a contingency day into the plan from the start, because once a bad day arrives, every one of them pulls against finding a way to race.
Which brings us to 2027.
The BMX track question
France’s 2027 UCI Cycling World Championships, the “Super Worlds”, is the most ambitious thing the sport has attempted: twenty disciplines, hundreds of rainbow jerseys, thousands of riders, spread across Haute-Savoie with the track events held at the velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, from 24 August to 5 September. BMX racing was always one of the harder pieces to place, for a simple reason: the host had no track, and one had to be built.
The original plan put that track at Les Glaisins, in Annecy-le-Vieux. In the end it wasn’t built there. A local residents’ group and the environmental federation France Nature Environnement challenged the project, and the Grenoble administrative tribunal suspended the building permit, finding serious doubt as to its legality. The opponents’ case centred on the protection of a natural site: noise, and the loss of land that is home to protected species. With the timeline tightening, the department decided to build elsewhere.
On Friday 18 September 2026, it confirmed the move in a brief press release. Citing “the delays in the procedures initiated against the BMX project” at Annecy, the department said it had “selected the Scionzier site for the construction of the future BMX stadium.” Scionzier, a commune in the Arve valley about forty minutes east of Annecy, was a natural choice: it had bid for the track before Annecy was chosen. Days later, a separate attempt by the residents’ group to suspend Annecy’s framework agreement for the Worlds was rejected by the same tribunal, which confirmed in passing that the BMX racing would now be held at Scionzier. Annecy keeps its place in the championships through the time trial around its lake.
For the Annecy BMX Club, the largest in France, the move is a disappointment. Its riders had hoped the Worlds would finally bring them a track in their own city, and club president Éric Mejecaze has been open about that. There is a silver lining close to home: nearby Cluses hosts the BMX freestyle events, so the Arve valley will have a genuine BMX cluster across two neighbouring communes.
What Scionzier has now is a site and a decision. What it does not have yet is the track itself. At the time of the announcement, the department had not set a date for construction to begin.
What’s worth watching
There are good reasons for confidence. France has done this before, and done it well: Nantes hosted a strong BMX Worlds in 2022. Big French institutions can move quickly when the political will and the public money are there, the rest of the championships has proven, world-class venues locked in, and Scionzier actively wanted the track. A site confirmed a little later than planned is a long way from a project in trouble.
The one real variable is time. A brand-new track, on a site confirmed ten months out, leaves less room than anyone would ideally want for the full run-up: time to build it, homologate it, and let riders put laps on it before it counts. That is simply the nature of a later start rather than a sign anything is going wrong, and it is the part of the job most worth keeping an eye on.
Brisbane had a proven, well-raced track, and the weather still had the final say. Scionzier’s task sits a step earlier: get the track built and ridden in good time, so that by the Worlds the only real variable left is the one nobody controls.
None of this is a prediction. It is simply what the next ten months will be measured against: when construction at Scionzier starts and finishes, when riders get to race on it before the Worlds, and what contingency is in place, for the site and for the schedule, should the weather behave as it did in Brisbane.
After Brisbane, everyone in BMX will be hoping 2027 ends with a start gate dropping on a final. Scionzier has the time to make sure it does.
