Chapter 1:
Bicycle versus Car

Biggest achievement: Surviving high-speed bike crash

1:30 pm Saturday 23 June 2012

Maintaining an easy cadence and effort over the rolling hills of Surrey I regularly glanced back to check my friend Tania who was happily pedalling on my wheel. She had made light work of the Surrey hills on a trip to visit London; after all she was used to riding in her home environment of the French Alps.

We had planned a low-key training ride on the London 2012 Olympic road cycle route, taking in the Box Hill ‘climb’, factoring in an obligatory cake-and-coffee stop mid route. In just a few weeks the same roads would be lined with cycling­-crazy fans in a year in which the UK embarked on a serious love affair with the sport ­ thanks to a landmark Tour De France win for Bradley Wiggins.

My newly built, custom-specced race bike had proved to be a flawless ride on its third outing. I felt at one with the bike as it cruised through training miles even though I had only sat on it a handful of times. I couldn’t wait to see what it could do when the summer season kicked off for my fourth year racing as a pro.

My attention turned to the increasing traffic levels around the middle of the day, and I checked on Tania again as we swooped up over the railway bridge at Oxshott. I soft-pedalled before cresting over the top of the small rise and sensed her closing down the small gap between us. My time trial bike was eager to be off and I allowed it to run a little on the slight descent, feathering the brakes lightly.

As I approached a junction I spotted a dark blue car stopped on the left waiting to turn into the road we were travelling along. I floated out into the road and stared at the driver’s side window to try to make eye contact. It was a tactic I used all the time to make sure I was spotted easily by motorists. The relentless flow of oncoming traffic made me confident the driver could not ­ and would not ­ pull out.

But then he did. Just metres from my front wheel.

What happened in a tenth of a second all unfolded in hideous, silent slow motion. My mind quickly presented me with two options, and neither of them was great. Option A: hit the front brakes, which would mean a trip over the handlebars onto his car and then probably into the oncoming traffic. Option B: use the emergency squeeze­the­rear­brake technique and hope like hell I could use my years of race-­honed skills to dodge him.

My subconscious immediately chose option B. I applied the back brake and aimed the front wheel slightly towards what I hoped would present itself as a small gap as the car moved forwards. Then the rear wheel of my bike left the road, and I sensed both the bike and I were airborne. I closed my eyes when I realised the bike was out of control, and I would be taking the full impact of a high­-speed crash on the right side of my body. There was nothing more I could do. It seemed a long tenth of a second.

When it came, the impact with the road was horrendous. My hip, back, right leg, left knee, right shoulder, right arm, left fingertips, right hand, head and helmet all met the tarmac, ripping the bike from under me, and I skidded along the road for some distance. One of my bike shoes remained clipped into the pedals as my right foot was yanked out of it forcefully.

I finally came to a stop in the middle of the road. When I opened my eyes I saw oncoming traffic, the wheels at eye­ level, pointed towards my head. Tania’s shouts to the driver of the dark blue hatchback, ‘stop, stop, stop!’ were ringing in my ears as I lay on the road.

I heard a long groan and realised the noise had just come from me. I felt oddly disconnected from the situation as I struggled to make sense of what had just happened. My mind was overloaded with debilitating feedback coming from my crumpled body, and I recognised the signals were indicating a serious state of shock and trauma.

I knew immediately that my right collarbone had snapped, literally like a twig beneath my ear. It was, though, the least of my worries. The pain radiating in relentless waves through my body from my back and my hips was intolerable.

My head pounded inside my helmet.

I could barely control my breathing and had to try to resist the temptation to close my eyes to cope with the high levels of pain. I became aware of a sinister tingling sensation in my lower body and lack of feeling in my legs. It was then that I knew I should not move.

Tania asked one of the motorists who had stopped to help to phone an ambulance. I could hear panic in her voice and wished that I could do something, but all I could do was lie in the middle of the road, feeling extremely vulnerable, and wait until help arrived. A car whizzed past dangerously close to me, impatient at the traffic slowing to a halt where I lay fallen on the road. I felt a rush of panic followed by a wave of adrenaline surge through me as I glimpsed car tyres flashing past within centimetres of my head and back.

Then my right hamstring started to go into an excruciating cramp. The flight instinct had kicked in and with it unconscious initiation of movement. No matter how hard I tried to focus on releasing the tension, the pain seemed to be an insurmountable barrier to initiating any movement in my leg at all. I begged Tania, who was now by my side, to straighten my left leg for me. She grasped my upper leg, knee and ankle and expertly helped the leg relax down on top of the right.

Then help arrived. She was called Debbie and had stopped when she had seen what had happened. Her face suddenly appeared right in front of mine, and she introduced herself then said she would help me until the ambulance arrived. Her simple act of kneeling in front of the oncoming traffic and mounting chaos around me on the road was very reassuring.

She helped me to focus on my breaths to manage the pain somewhat, and every time I attempted to close my eyes, she would lightly bring me back to the present and remind me to continue breathing in and out, with her. During this time she managed to coax from me simple facts such was who I was, where I lived, whether I knew where I was and what had happened to me.

Tania and Debbie had a brief animated conversation about how soon an ambulance would arrive, but I wasn’t sure how much longer I could hold on. My eyes kept wanting to close, and I wished I could switch off the mounting pain levels. Debbie helped support my head from the hardness of the road as I lay there, and I used my left arm, slowly and painstakingly with assistance, to take some of the weight off my broken right shoulder.

From my view lying on the tarmac I could occasionally make out the legs of cyclists who were on the side of the road and had obviously stopped to assist. The kit they were wearing seemed familiar, and I tried to focus on that to distract from the pain. I was now having difficulty maintaining concentration and struggled to keep breathing in time with Debbie. Tania reassured me the ambulance was on its way.

'It is very important to gain the help of witnesses at the scene of the accident, recording their contact details in case their help or observations are needed in the future. Don’t lose the small window of opportunity when other cyclists, motorists or passers-by are present.'

Tania Cotton, Health in Motion founder, movement analyst, British chartered physiotherapist

After what seemed like hours lying on the road a rapid response vehicle arrived, and the emergency care assistant assessed my situation. My relief turned to panic when he swiftly suggested that I be moved from the road because of the growing traffic jam.

The thought of being moved terrified me. My levels of pain were now off the scale. Fortunately Debbie and Tania were united and robust: no spinal board, no moving. In the end he came round to their view and agreed it was best to wait for an ambulance.

He tried to fit a breathing device to provide me with gas pain relief. It didn’t work. We ran through the questions: Where are you? Who are you? What happened? Then he asked me to move my left arm from under my right shoulder because he wanted to trace where the blood on the road underneath me was coming from. Moving triggered another wave of nauseating, excruciating pain. The source of the bleeding: the skin had been scraped off my left fingertips as I skidded along the road.

Despite the warmth of a summer day I could now feel myself getting cold very quickly and noticed I had started to shake uncontrollably. It had not occurred to me to ask for something to keep me warm. Tania suggested to the emergency responder that he should find a blanket to cover me as I was going into shock.

By now my mouth was completely dry and swallowing was an effort. ­ The athlete in me recognised that having been riding for three hours I was now in need of water or fluids. Thirst indicates that the body is already slightly dehydrated and over many years of honing fuelling strategies on long rides and runs it was efficient and automatic to drink little and often on endurance sessions. I’d gone past the point of having anything in my control and all my senses seemed on high alert. I was desperate for water.

'Individuals will react differently when it comes to managing high pain levels and uncertainty at the scene of an accident. If at all possible it is...