RIDGEDALE, Missouri: Two laps during the regular season kept Mikayla Nielsen from contending for the WMX Championship. This week, in a non-points’ paying Invitational, she has a shot at redemption and a chance to remind the competitors she is one of the top three riders in the field at Thunder Ridge Nature Arena.
The WMX Championship is broken into two segments. Three races are run in the first half of the Pro Motocross season; the other three are the final races in the heat of the summer.
Nielsen swept the podium in the Hangtown Motocross Classic in Rancho Cordova, California, and was on pace to finish second the following week in Moto 1 at Thunder Valley. On the final lap, her fuel pump failed on a steep uphill segment of the track. Nielsen’s race was over; she was credited in 16th in that moto. She finished third in Moto 2 and faced questions of what might have been.
Nielsen rebounded quickly to finish fourth and third at High Point before the summer break. She was still in the hunt despite earning minimal points the week before.
The season resumed with three races remaining and in a chaotic Moto 1 in Unadilla, New York, Nielsen crashed out of another podium position with one lap to go. She fell from third to 23rd.
“I had two moto DNFs, so that’s 50 points down,” Nielsen said before Friday’s Free Practice for the SMX Playoff finale. “Pretty proud of myself, crawling my way back up from that. It was definitely a dark season just trying to get my mental right every time I go out on that track. It’s pretty hard, but given that I was able to get third in these points, I was pretty proud of myself.”
With an overall victory in the 2025 season opener at Fox Raceway, Nielsen is one of two women to beat the three-time champion, Lachlan Turner. Charli Cannon, who finished second in the 2026 championship, is the other.
In the Thunder Ridge Invitational, the playing field is level once again. Nielsen will square off with Turner, Cannon, and 10 others among the WMX elite.
In 2026, Nielsen balanced responsibilities in the off-road AMA National Grand Prix Championship, but the Invitational is important enough that she did not lose focus in the four weeks since the WMX wrapped up its season at Ironman.
“I took a chance on myself, went to sandbox for the summer and trained the whole time there by myself with the whole sandbox crew,” Nielsen said. “So I felt like my riding was really well and I feel like I picked a couple of things that honestly could help me out here. So excited to go race this and I definitely have my hands full with doing the off-road series as well as this, but this is the biggest platform.”
The long challenging track in Thunder Ridge will give the women of the WMX plenty of room to test their skill on a track containing Supercross elements. That could be a challenge for a rider accustomed to the rigors of off-road racing.
She was fourth in the first Free Practice on Friday and fifth in the second session. But Nielsen is on lady who cannot be counted out until the checkered flag waves.
