Nigel Sylvester‘s wheels are spinning. Such a statement likely elicits less than a shrug given his prominence as one of the preeminent BMX athletes of a generation. Commonalities aside, that observation speaks more to his mind than his cyclical stunts, as the former phenom is taking inventory of the pieces that make up the 38-year-old man he’s grown into over the past two decades.
It’s a mid-summer afternoon, and Sylvester and I are in deep conversation about the improbability of a Black teenager from Jamaica, Queens, turning the world of extreme sports on its head despite having the odds stacked against him.
“It was difficult because the BMX world wasn’t in Jamaica, Queens,” Sylvester says of the cultural disparity within the sport during the ’90s and early ’00s. “We didn’t have any skate parks; there were no pros. There was no contest coming through there; there was no BMX media.”
Yet, if Sylvester has proven anything throughout his life, it’s that barriers and guardrails rarely temper his ambition or invoke fear in his heart. He’d rather reserve that energy to continue to blaze trails and build on his legacy, not only that of himself, but also that of his friend and mentor, late BMX icon Dave Mirra, who passed away by suicide in February 2016.
