Connor Fields
- Three-Time Olympian & Two-Time World Champion — The first American to win Olympic BMX Gold and one of the sport’s all-time great racers.
- A Powerful Story of Resilience — Survived a life-threatening Olympic crash and rebuilt his physical and cognitive abilities through 11 months of intense recovery.
- Lessons in Peak Performance & Adversity — Shares practical strategies for resilience, overcoming fear, embracing imperfection, and refusing to let setbacks define your future.
Connor Fields Speaker Biography
Connor Fields is a three-time Olympian, a two-time World Champion, and the only American to win a Gold Medal for the United States in BMX Racing. He is also the only Olympic athlete who has both won the Olympics… and nearly died while competing during the games.
As one of the world’s all-time greatest BMX racers, Connor has represented the United States over 50 times in more than 25 countries across the globe. In 2016, he reached the pinnacle of success for an Olympic athlete, coming home with a Gold Medal to show for his unrelenting dedication.
At the 2021 Tokyo Games, Connor was the number one seed in his semi-final when a mid-race collision sent him into the track at 40 miles per hour, recounted as one of the worst accidents in Olympic history. Instead of defending his title, he found himself fighting for his life. He laid unconscious in a hospital bed for 5 days, ultimately diagnosed with a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) including life-threatening hemorrhages to four different parts of his brain, along with broken ribs, a collapsed lung, and torn shoulder and bicep ligaments.
After a grueling year of rehabilitation, Connor jumped on his bike the very first day he was cleared to ride, determined to go out on his own terms.
Since retiring, Connor has become the Emmy Nominated host of PBS’s Outdoor Nevada and provided commentary for the Emmy-Winning NBC broadcasts during the 2024 Summer Olympics. He serves on the boards of USA Cycling and USABMX, coaches the next generation of riders, and travels the country presenting his keynote, “Now What?” inspiring others to keep moving forward after wins, losses, and even a brush with death.
Book this SpeakerFeatured Videos
Speech Topics
Now What? Moving forward after wins, losses, missed targets, and sudden change.
What would you do if the goal you worked toward your entire life was finally within reach, but achieving it passed you by? How would it feel to achieve your wildest dream? What would you do to keep moving forward?
What would you do if your foundation was rocked, and you were forced to adapt to unforeseen change?
Connor Fields shows you and your team how to move forward after wins, losses, missed targets, and sudden change in his keynote “Now What?”
Connor is the only Olympic Athlete who has both won a gold medal, and nearly died while competing at the Olympic games. His 11-year career as a professional BMX racer, and as one of the most dominant athletes in his sport, was built on the foundations of precision, preparation, and peak performance. He can teach what it takes to win at the highest level. But, it is his experience as an athlete whose career was marred by a brush with death, that has given him a unique insight on how to move forward when everything changes in an instant.
In his keynote, “Now What?” Connor walks his audience through his journey to the olympic games —where triumph and failure collided— and shares how resilience, adaptability, and mental strength shaped his path. From choking in his first final, to bringing home gold, to fighting for his life, he learned that having a true champion’s mentality isn’t just about reaching the summit—it’s about how you rise again, and find a way to keep going, when faced with what seems to be an impossible obstacle. In “Now What?”, audiences learn how the decisions he made in his most pivotal moments kept him moving forward and on toward success.
Because encountering change or adversity is not a matter of “if’, it’s “when”, and the real differentiator isn’t talent, it’s preparation. What separates those who “tried” from those who “succeeded” is having the resilience, identity, clarity, and decision-making framework in place before disruptions hit.
Through powerful storytelling and practical tools, Connor inspires audiences to:
• Set Clear Goals: Once you know what you want to achieve, how do you get there? Connor outlines his step-by-step process to tackling big goals.
• Lean Into Resilience: After a failure, what do you do to get better? Connor shares what he learned from failing at the highest level: how to correct mistakes and get them right the next time around.
• Sustain Success: Now that you have won, you have met your goals, how do you stay at the top? Be ready to sustain success with insights from someone who stayed in the top 5 of World Rankings for over a decade.
• Keep Failure in Perspective: No one wants to fail, but if you are here, you have a chance to fix it. Nearly losing your life and having the world’s attention to see if you would survive changes the way you look at failure. Be able to keep failure in perspective and stay optimistic about the future
