Team USA's Felicia Stancil is the 2022 BMX racing world champion. Racing in Nantes, France, she grabbed the hole shot and held the lead to the line, beating Zoé Claessens of Switzerland by one-hundredth of a second. Merel Smulders of the Netherlands took third, matching her bronze from Tokyo.
The win came a year after Stancil finished fourth in her Olympic debut in Tokyo, and ten years after the first of her two world junior titles. She had also won a youth world title in France at age 10.
It capped a big comeback. Stancil dislocated her hip in a crash at her first race of the year and missed about four months, according to USA Cycling.
She is the third American woman to win the elite world title, after Michelle Cairns (1997) and Alise Willoughby (2017 and 2019). Willoughby finished fourth in Nantes, and Tokyo Olympic champion Beth Shriever went out in the semifinals.
Simon Marquart of Switzerland won the men's final, which had no American riders.