How Is BMX Freestyle Scored?

A UCI park contest is judged by a panel of five. Each judge watches the run from the same vantage point, and each submits one mark between 0.00 and 99.99 — not a score per criterion, not a score per trick. The five marks are averaged, and that average is the run score.

This is the part that surprises people coming from gymnastics or ski jumping: there is no published deduction table and no difficulty value assigned to individual tricks. The panel is expected to hold a shared understanding of what a run is worth, and the averaging is what converts five opinions into one number.

The practical consequence is that judge calibration matters more than the arithmetic. With one mark per run, a judge who habitually sits two points below the panel moves every rider they score, which is why contests brief their panel before the first heat and why organisers review panel spread afterwards.

The run is 60 seconds in the UCI Park format, at World Cup and Olympic level alike. Within that minute the rider chooses their own line — nothing is compulsory, and no element has to appear.

The number of runs that count depends on the round:

• Qualification — the rider takes two runs, and the two scores are averaged. Consistency is rewarded: a 90 and a 60 qualify worse than two 76s.
• Final — the rider takes two runs, and only the better one counts. Consistency stops mattering entirely, which is why finals produce the biggest attempts and the biggest crashes.

That single difference explains most of what the crowd sees. A rider who has already banked a strong first run in a final has nothing to lose on the second, so the second run is where new tricks appear. José Torres Gil won Paris 2024 on his first run with 94.82 and then rode the second knowing it could not lower his score.

UCI describes the panel as assessing difficulty, execution, style, originality, flow, height and amplitude, along with how the rider uses the course. These are not separate boxes on a scorecard — they are the shared vocabulary behind a single number.

• Difficulty — the technical demand of the tricks. A triple tailwhip and a barspin are not worth the same.
• Execution — landings, foot placement, and whether the rider rolled away clean.
• Amplitude — height out of the transitions and distance over the box. Two riders doing the same trick are often separated here alone.
• Variety — how many different tricks, spin directions and obstacles appear. Repeating a trick in the same run is the standard way to lose marks.
• Flow — whether the run reads as one continuous line rather than a set of tricks with pauses between them.
• Progression — tricks the panel has not seen before. Kieran Reilly's triple flair, first landed in January 2022, is the clearest recent example of a move that reset expectations.
• Course use — which features the rider chose, and whether transfers connected sections other riders rode separately.

Grassroots contests often split these into an explicit scorecard so riders can see where a run lost points. Both models are legitimate; the federation model is faster to run, the split model is easier to explain to a rider afterwards.

Park is the Olympic discipline and the one the format above describes: bowls, boxes and a 60-second run.

Street sits outside the UCI programme entirely. Contests such as X Games and Simple Session set their own formats — sometimes timed runs, sometimes an open jam on a plaza course where the panel forms an impression over a whole session rather than a single minute. There is no single street rulebook, and that is deliberate.

Flatland has its own UCI world title and its own judging emphasis. With no obstacles at all, amplitude and course use fall away, and the panel weighs control, the linking of combinations, and originality instead.

Dirt shortens the run to a set number of jumps rather than a time limit, which shifts weight onto amplitude and trick difficulty and away from line choice.