Australian Jared Graves has turned his back on the Olympics and is now concentrating on being a professional downhill mountain biker.
"I'm not pursuing any more BMX-related goals," Graves said. "I have been concentrating on my mountain bike for the last couple of years."
Graves (29), a professional mountain biker since 2002 and a member of the Yeti Cycles-Fox Racing Factory team, is sponsored for mountain biking and not BMX.
"After Beijing I concentrated on mountain biking for two years and realised I didn't want to go through the whole Olympic process again," he said.
"There are a lot of behind-the-scenes politics and dramas that people don't see. It's not something I wanted to do again."
He started BMX at the age of 4 and it was the family sport until he was aged 12.
"I'd had enough by that time amd started riding mountain bikes and doing other sports, as well," Graves said.
"I was just having fun with my friends and didn't start racing until I was 15."
He had 10 years away from the sport but resumed BMX racing when it became an Olympic Games discipline, when he was aged 22.
Graves reached the podium in three of the four World Cup events before the Olympics and was ranked No 2 in the world.
"I was hoping for a medal at Beijing but sport doesn't always work out the way you want it," he said.
Since the Olympics Graves became world champion on his mountain bike in Four Cross (4X) in 2009 and has won the World Cup series for the last three years.
He is now concentrating his energies on downhill racing.
"It is a bigger event than Four Cross," he said. "I have achieved my goals in Four Cross and I now want to achieve my goals in downhill."
He has a long way to go because he has only raced in one UCI ranking event in two years and is not in the top 200 for downhill.
He enjoys being a professional mountain biker.
"I always just wanted to ride my bike and have fun doing that,"he said. "It's what I love doing. You can't complain when you get to do it every day."
He has no immediate plans to retire from the sport.
"Sometimes when you get into the 30s you get other priorities in life, like settling down and having a family, and get sick of all the years of travelling and living out of a suitcase for half the year," he said.
He admitted getting scared on occasions.
"You don't get scared when everything is going well," he said. "But everyone has their moments and has a crash. It never gets easy but you get used to dealing with it.
"It's no big deal. If you don't hurt yourself you just get up, wipe off the dust, and go again."
His most serious injury was to lose a kidney in a race at his home town of Toowoomba when he was aged 17. He has had a few broken bones since then, but nothing that serious.
Jared Graves
At a glance
• Age: 29.
• Home town: Toowoomba, Australia.
• Sport: Mountainbiking.
• Record: Olympic Games BMX 2008 (6th), Won 4X World Cup 2009, 2010, 2011, Four Cross (4X) world champion 2009, silver medal 2010.
