While the island focused on the biennial Cook Islands Games featuring hundreds of athletes competing in various sporting codes, 14 youngsters took part in the Cook Islands BMX Pump Track Nationals held on Monday at The Rock Bike Park’ in Ngatangiia.

BMX enthusiast Tony Takurua emphasised that the goal was to give the local children a purpose to see through their abilities to represent Cook Islands on the international level.

The New Zealand-based Cook Islander said they also wanted to help parents manage their children’s screen time while getting them out and active on something new and exciting.

“The goal is all about the kids, about just having them on the bikes and being active and giving the kids a purpose of feeling like people want to help support them,” Takurua said.

“It’s not all about adults, we as adults have already had our time as kids. We’ve got the experience to offer to these kids some bit of knowledge on what enjoyment is. It’s about enjoying the sport and about being active.

“The world’s been taken over by phones, unfortunately, and kids forget about riding bikes and doing fun things like we used to do.

“Fortunately, on the island there’s only a few sports that people would go to and support and this is a minority sport in BMX, but BMX is an Olympic sport, BMX freestyle, BMX skate park.”

Yesterday’s event marked the second Cook Islands BMX Pump Track Nationals.

Takurua commended the turnout and the weather, compared to last year’s terrible weather for a first nationals BMX competition.

His experience and history in the sport goes back over 30 years. Takurua used to race in the BMX World Series, was an Olympic supporter and was a BMX selector in New Zealand.

He is in Rarotonga with a group of former New Zealand champions and world title holders in BMX. They are eager to push the next generation of Cook Islanders to their fullest potential.

“Without this starting at grassroot level, they’ll never know and I can tell you now, we unfortunately didn’t finish our school programme because we didn’t get the support by a lot of people, but if they understand, we put it in schools, like any sport, there’s some skilled talent here in the Cool Islands,” Takurua said.

“These kids are natural athletes. There are four kids here today that couldn’t ride a bike until months ago and I could take them to New Zealand and they could compete against New Zealand’s top and I tell you that would frighten them because of how good they are.”

Their next development is to build a skate park on the Spit land. They hope that in 2028, two or three of these fortunate children from the Cook Islands will represent the country internationally.