Natalya Diehm

Natalya Diehm first noticed the skate park when she was riding home from school in the Queensland town of Gladstone as an eight-year-old. Soon she was putting her BMX bike and the skate park together.

“I started riding BMX when I was eight years old,” Natalya said. “Riding your bike and going to the skate park was one of the only things to do in my small hometown and I fell in love with it.”

Natalya made her debut on the Australian team in 2019, after coming back from her fourth knee reconstruction, which forced her out of the 2018 season.

Proving herself as one to watch, Natalya won the 2019 BMX Pro Cup, which held events in USA, Australia, Germany and Mexico.

She went on to claim a top-six finish at the 2019 Urban World Championships in China and took out the top spot at the inaugural Oceania Championships later that year.

While Natalya entered the Tokyo Olympic year suffering from a hand injury, this certainly didn’t slow her down. At the start of 2021 she won her third national title at the Australian Championships.

Natalya defied the odds just to be on the start line in Tokyo after rupturing the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in her knee for the fifth time two weeks before the Games.

But she still produced a strong showing in the women’s BMX park freestyle by posting the fifth-highest score in seeding and then briefly occupying the bronze medal position in the final before eventually finishing fifth behind Great Britain’s gold medallist Charlotte Worthington.

The Queenslander’s score of 86.00 in the final was just 3.20 points off the podium in the event’s Olympic debut.

Natalya bounced back in 2023, taking silver in the Oceania Continental Championships and the Australian titles, followed by what was her highest-ever finish internationally – fourth place at the UCI World Cup in Bazhong, China.

In 2024, taking part in the first ever Olympic Qualifying Series for BMX Freestyle, Natalya finished sixth in the world in the qualification standings.

Her spot in the standings, which weighed heavily on the performances of the athletes in Shanghai in May and Budapest in June, was enough to auto-qualify for the Olympics and a clutch ride in the Budapest final sealed it. Her 90.86 was less than three points behind the winner Hannah Roberts (93.48) from the USA.

She made Olympic history at La Concorde in Paris by becoming the first Australian woman to win a BMX medal of any discipline, with bronze in the BMX Freestyle final.

While the pressure of the occasion saw some of her rivals crash in their opening run, Natalya put down a superb score of 88.80 - which after a nervous wait in the hot-seat - would prove to be enough to secure a spot on the podium behind China’s Yawen Deng and American Perris Benegas.

Having suffered five ACL ruptures and two serious shoulder injuries, Natalya has had plenty of time off the bike to contemplate her future.

“After Tokyo I didn’t see the light, I just had to keep pushing forward and I knew it wasn’t the way I wanted to go out," Natalya said in the moments after claiming Olympic bronze.

“I wanted to go out on my terms where I went my hardest."

Certain that she wanted to stay in the sport after the Paris Olympics, in 2023 Natalya became the first person in Australia to attain a BMX freestyle development coach qualification with AusCycling and the Queensland Academy of Sport.

“I knew coaching would be something I'd love to do for many reasons,” she said. “I want to continue to see the sport grow nationally, inspire kids and make a difference.”