In the spring of 2024, I crashed in Belgium. Three pelvic fractures. A sacrum fracture. I was airlifted off the course and spent the next nine months trying to get back to being a bike racer.
I don’t write about it often, partly because it’s not the most comfortable thing to revisit, and partly because the story isn’t really about the crash — it’s about what came after. But enough people have asked me about it, and I think it’s worth telling properly.
What Happened
It was a road race. I came down in a crash that wasn’t my fault and wasn’t anyone else’s really — just the kind of thing that happens in a bunch when 80 women are racing hard through a technical section. I knew immediately that something was wrong. Not the usual “I’ve hit the deck and I’m winded” kind of wrong. The kind where you lie very still because moving seems like a genuinely bad idea.
Three pelvic fractures and a sacrum fracture. The sacrum is the bone at the base of your spine, and fracturing it means that the act of sitting — of being in a saddle — is not available to you for a considerable period of time. Which is a significant problem if cycling is what you do.
The Nine Months
The recovery was long and slow and frequently boring, which is not a glamorous thing to admit. You get told a timeline, and then the timeline shifts, and then it shifts again, and eventually you stop thinking about the timeline and start thinking about just getting through the day.
I had a lot of time to think. About what kind of athlete I wanted to be, about what I’d do differently if I got back, about whether I still actually wanted to race bikes or whether the injury had taken something that wasn’t coming back.
The answer to that last question came quite clearly, quite early. I still wanted it. The frustration of not being able to train was a constant reminder of how much I missed it, which told me something useful: if you miss a thing that hard when it’s taken away, it matters to you.
I worked with physiotherapists, strength and conditioning coaches, anyone who had useful knowledge about this specific type of injury. The pelvis is not a simple structure. The loads it handles on a bike — especially in a sprint, especially climbing out of the saddle — are significant. Getting back to racing-level function took a long time and a lot of tedious, incremental work.
Coming Back
The first rides back were humbling. Not because of the effort — I expected to be unfit — but because of the mental adjustment required. I’d been a professional cyclist at UCI Continental level, racing World Tour events like the Tour de Suisse and Dwars door Vlaanderen. Then I was doing 20-minute easy rides and feeling grateful for them.
You recalibrate. You have to. If you spend those early comeback sessions comparing yourself to who you were before, you’ll go mad. I tried to treat each ride as its own complete thing: not a step toward something else, just a ride that I was doing and finishing and coming home from.
That sounds straightforward. It was not straightforward. But it worked.
The Turn Toward Gravel
Somewhere in the middle of the recovery, my coach at the time — Sean Yates — suggested I try a gravel bike. The more upright position, the more forgiving geometry, the fact that you’re not locked into the same aggressive posture for hours on end. It made physiological sense given where I was in my recovery.
What he probably didn’t anticipate was that I would immediately love it.
Road racing had been my world for years, and I was good at it. But gravel felt like something my body was designed for. The long, sustained efforts. The self-sufficiency. The fact that the terrain is varied and constantly changing and forces you to be present in a way that a road race sometimes doesn’t. I did a couple of local events. And then I entered the British National Gravel Championships.
You know what happened next.
What I Learned
I don’t believe that things happen for a reason, or that the crash was somehow necessary for me to find gravel racing. That’s a tidy story but it’s not honest. The crash was an accident. It was painful. I would rather it hadn’t happened.
What is true is that the nine months changed how I approach everything. When I’m deep in a race and it’s hurting — and gravel always hurts, eventually — I have a very specific reference point for what hard actually looks like. Lying on a road in Belgium waiting for an ambulance is hard. Racing 360 kilometres across Catalonia is hard in a different and much better way.
The injury gave me a tolerance for discomfort that I didn’t have before. Not because I’m tougher — I don’t think I am — but because the baseline shifted. I know what I’ve come back from. When a race gets difficult, I know that I’ve handled worse.
That’s not nothing. Honestly, it might be everything.
If you’re a rider going through injury, the British Cycling welfare team have good resources. The road back is long. Keep going.