Afraid No More

Nikita Ducarroz overcomes anxiety to compete globally in freestyle BMX

By Steve Stein

When she was a teenager, Nikita Ducarroz’s anxieties were so bad that she was afraid to her leave her house.

If she was outside her home and she felt the slightest bit ill, she raced home.

“My anxieties affected my everyday life,” she said. “I played travel soccer, but I had to quit because it’s a team sport and my team couldn’t count on me.”

Fast forward a few years. Now 29, Ducarroz is one of the world’s top female freestyle BMX (bicycle motocross) athletes. 

Competing for Switzerland, her father’s Jean-Francois Ducarroz’s homeland, the 5-foot-4 dynamo travels around the world for competitions.

She won a bronze medal at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo (which were moved to 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic) and finished 10th at the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.

BMX first became an Olympic sport at the Japan Games.

Nikita would love to compete at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles after growing up in California. She was born in France but moved to California with her family when she was an infant.

She recently finished sixth at the Sacramento X Games and eighth at the X Games Chiba in Japan.

It was Nikita’s Chaldean mother—Nicole Abate Ducarroz, a Detroit native who now lives in Sonoma, California, one hour north of San Francisco, but still has relatives living in the Detroit area—who inadvertently lit the fire that eventually drove Nikita to give freestyle BMX a try after she gave up soccer.

“My mom told me I had to pick up a sport so I’d stay active,” Nikita said. “I loved riding my bike, so I did that. It was something I could do on my own at my own pace. And if I didn’t feel good, I could go right home.”

Riding her bike led Nikita to learn about freestyle BMX and eventually embrace it. 

So how does someone who at one time had crippling anxieties excel at an “extreme” sport at the highest level, where nerves of steel are needed?

“I’m not sure,” Nikita said. “I do know that when I have a tough stretch with my anxieties, I pick up new tools that help me manage my symptoms. My toolbox gets bigger.”

Her mother agreed.

“Every time Nikita learns something, she comes back stronger,” she said.

Nikita said it also helps that the BMX community is like a family.

“I have friends around the world through BMX,” she said. “Sure, we’re competitive, but we share a passion for the sport and feel joy for each other when we accomplish a new trick.”

Nicole said her daughter’s drive to learn and succeed in freestyle BMX eventually quelled her doubts that she could compete in the sport and at the same time allowed her to manage her anxieties.

Nikita has been very open about her struggles with anxiety, going back to eighth grade, when she did a project on her struggles and got positive feedback. Some students who read her project described their own experiences with anxiety. 

“They learned they weren’t alone, and I did, too,” Nikita said.

Nicole said she’s proud of her daughter for opening up publicly about her anxieties, as many world-class athletes have done in recent years. “She’s shown the courage to be honest and vulnerable,” she said. 

Nicole is the youngest of five children of Michael and Rosemary Abate. Rosemary, the oldest girl among the eight children of Shaw and Mary Hakim, died in 2017. Nicole’s father is 90 “and still kicking,” she said. Shaw at one time owned several roller rinks in the Detroit area.

Nikita has two brothers: Jonas, 27, and Julien, 23, who were both born in California and live there. Jonas is “focused on ecology, horticulture and specialty breeding, and developing a career centered on ecology and sustainable living,” Nicole said. Julien is a semester away from graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in physics.

Nikita lives in Costa Rica with her husband, firefighter Roberto Corea.