“Drugs, give me drugs!” was the first thing I remember saying as I came to in an Italian ambulance. I knew I had crashed — that was obvious. The pain in my left shoulder and back was significant. My white and red Canadian National Champion’s jersey was torn apart and had a lot more red on it than when I had pulled it out of the original package, and I was strapped down to a stretcher.
Speaking Italian as well as Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds, I cried, “Bisogno paracetamol! Antidolorifico! Antidolorifico, per favore!” My race radio was digging into my back, and the plastic stretcher, which I would proceed to spend the next six hours on, was making it impossible to find any vestige of comfort.
I thought to myself, “I know I was in Milano–Torino, I obviously crashed, I definitely broke my collarbone, my left hand looks like a boiled sausage… but how the hell did I get here?”
For the next six hours — predominantly spent lying in the hallway of a hospital outside Milan, beside a lady crying, “Momma… momma… alora… aloraaaaaaa” — I tried to retrace the moments leading up to the crash. I knew I had leg warmers on, I knew I was trying to take them off, but I didn’t remember much after. I prayed that it wasn’t a stupid mistake. I hoped that I hadn’t crashed because I had tried to take them off, but the logical, likely, conclusion was embarrassingly crushing.
My 2025 season, more or less, has been one to forget. It’s been a bust. I began the year in Australia with a lot of optimism. I flew to Adelaide in great shape, with a focus on supporting Stevie Williams (the 2024 winner of the race) at the Tour Down Under, and Corbin Strong at the Cadel Evans Road Race. However, an injury to Stevie saw me have to pivot mid-race and take on leadership responsibilities (I finished 10th), but I did a solid job of supporting Corbin Strong in the final of Cadel’s.
When I boarded the plane to fly back to Europe, I felt a lot of optimism for the rest of the year. I was moving well, trending upwards, and looking to have one of the best seasons of my career. After getting home and doing a bit of a reset, I flew to Tenerife with the objective of doing an altitude camp that would set me up for my European season. On the island, I got fit. My weight came down, and every day it felt easier riding up the Canarian volcano.
After two and a half weeks of living like a monk — cooped up in an altitude room, listening to the incessant push of air from an altitude machine — I boarded a plane to Milan, to race a race I had won back in 2019. Of all the Italian one-day classics, Milano–Torino may be the least complicated race to finish.
The vast majority of the race is not spent speeding on the traditionally serpentine roads of Italy, but on pan-flat and straight highways. Yet — as I would discover after my team doctor was finally allowed into the hospital to see me, some six hours of lying alone in that Italian hospital — I managed to mess the easiest part of the race up. While taking off my left leg warmer, I hit a pothole, twisting my wheel sideways. My left hand went directly into the wheel, and I flipped over the bike, landing directly on my head and shoulder.
All the work I had put in over those months — all of the time away from my family, all of the times I chose to eat a 0% fat Yopro over some cake at the training camp buffet — was about as useful as tits on a bull. I would have to get surgery, I would have to miss all of the races I had targeted that spring, and I would be left asking, “Should I really still be doing this?”
I tried pushing this sentiment out of my head, but the more I thought about it, the rational voice in me made a lot of valid arguments. I’m turning 39, I have more screws in me than in my garage workbench, I have enough money, and I still want to take on some big endurance challenges before my age catches up to me. I still had a year and a half left on my contract, but the idea of doing another year after this one seemed hard to get my head around.
During my convalescence, I decided that I wouldn’t make a decision on retirement. I knew, regardless of whether I would stop at the end of 2025, I wanted to finish this season off with a bang. And in order to train as hard as I would need to, I couldn’t have the idea of retirement floating over me. I rehabbed, I went to physio, I sweated on the home trainer, I hunkered down on my diet, I went back up to altitude (this time to 2,400m in Andorra), and I got into arguably the best shape of my career. My thoughts weren’t on stopping my career, they weren’t on the crash I just had, but only on two things: the Tour de Suisse and the Tour de France. This is what I love most about sport — it’s the singular focus, it’s the purpose, it’s the uncomplicated beauty of having nothing but the thought of getting one leg over a pedal, one meter further up a climb.
For somebody who has severe attention issues and ridiculously high energy, the simplicity and clarity that I get from training for something big is cathartic. I have always had a chaotic, scattered brain — an energy that exists in my mind that can really only be quieted after flogging myself on a bike for six hours. When I lie in bed after one of these sessions, the bliss and calm that I feel is intoxicating.
So once again, I found myself, in great shape, boarding a plane to Switzerland with big goals and great form — only for all that hard work to be erased by unfortunate circumstances. I had been moving well in the opening stages of Tour de Suisse, but when I woke up on the morning of stage 3, I felt a dry itch in my lungs and a burning sensation in the back of my throat. With a fear of compromising not just Suisse but the Tour de France, and as my symptoms only worsened, I decided to abandon the race a stage later.
Cycling is a cruel and unforgiving sport. Even the best riders (minus Pogačar) have a success rate in races of less than 25%. Failure is a common occurrence for almost every cyclist on the planet. Dealing with this failure is often what sets most pros apart. This, in many ways, is why this sport in particular is so analogous to life. Life is an unending cycle of mistakes and failures — as a father and husband, I’m acutely aware of this.
Most people have far fewer wins than they do f**k-ups, but in my mind, in order to succeed in the sport of pro cycling — like in life — you have to embrace the fact that you will always have setbacks, and you have to find beauty in the process of trying to overcome them. So, with this in mind, I now board a plane from Toulouse to Lille, dead set on overcoming a season to forget.