Tom Gloag was at the top of his game last August before his form was cruelly taken away from him in the blink of an eye. During a training ride near his home in Spain, disaster struck when he was hit by a car driver, leaving him with catastrophic knee damage.
Just three months previously, Gloag was part of Visma-Lease a Bike’s Giro d'Italia winning team, but faced a long road back to recovery if he was ever going to be able to ride a bike again, let alone compete.
After two rounds of open knee surgery, months of rehabilitation with his physios - Richard Spink and Marjolein Dukker - followed, before he made an emotional comeback at the recent Czech Tour. Gloag even marked his return with a stage win on stage three's summit finish, his first victory as a professional.
"There's not really a timeline for how these things go. It just takes however long it takes," Gloag told Cycling Weekly as he reflected on his long comeback. "I was T-boned by a car and I shattered my right knee into too many pieces to count.
"I then had complete knee reconstruction surgery, spent six weeks in a wheelchair, and then had to learn to walk again and just basically reconfigure my body. The biggest issue actually ended up being that my muscles had atrophied so much that I was basically just bone at that point.
"After six weeks of not using your quads, your quads start to atrophy in about 48 hours and I was six weeks without being able to bend my knee."
"Two weeks in, I still couldn't bend it, but they took my cast off, and I was able to shower," he added. "The first time I ever saw my leg at that point, I actually then fainted in the shower. I bent my knee, my girlfriend caught me and I was out for about a minute just at the sight of how much muscle I'd lost. I still had four weeks left of not being able to move it, so that was about as bad as it got.
"Once I started to get into the rehab, there was a big task ahead of just trying to reconfigure everything. But actually, from there, I had a really positive experience of just progress. I was fortunate enough to have a really, really good medical team and my coach Jarno Voorintholt around me."
Gloag developed a reputation for being one of the politest, most upbeat and positive young riders in the sport. He admitted that there were low points during his recovery, but says he looked to find positivity wherever he could.
"It's strange because don't get me wrong, it was an extremely difficult experience to go through, but it was also very, very rewarding," he explained. "I don't think I've ever done something that I've taken so much pride in just because the amount of progress you see on a day to day basis is remarkable. There's a really visual progress that you can track which I found really, really rewarding.
"To be honest I was also really really lucky with having good surgeons, good physios, and the team just gave me time. I feel super grateful that I was in a great situation to be able to handle not such a great situation."
Gloag says that the only way to handle the process was to break it down into small steps.
"When I was able to start bending my knee again at the six week point that felt really big," he said. "Then when I then started doing some heavy gym work because you start gaining some confidence that you can put some stress through that knee. That's quite a big thing because you lose so much trust in what your right side can do.
"In reality though, these things just always take time. Don't get me wrong, you need the best support around you. But a lot of that best support is people just telling you to take time, and that's it."
There was light at the end of the tunnel when he pinned on a number once more last weekend. Gloag said that getting his hands in the air came as a huge relief, but his experiences the day before left him with more of a sense of satisfaction.
"Stage two was where I felt more rewarded," he explained. "There was a big fight for the break and then there were two really hard climbs to finish. I wasn't nearly as good on stage two, as I then was on three. We did this climb twice and the first time up the finishing climb, when we came down I remember I was a little bit emotional.
"I had a few tears in my eyes because finally, I was feeling like a bike racer again. That was actually a bigger moment for me than winning the next day. In a strange way you would have thought that it would have been when I crossed the finish line first. But it was the day before just because I was proving to myself that I could ride hard on the knee in a race situation again."
What next for Gloag now his comeback is complete? Ever the modest character, he made no grand statement of intent and no mention of big races that he’s determined to make his mark on. Instead, the goals and targets remain simple.
"The objectives for me now are really just getting some consistency," he said. "It's something that I've struggled with for as long as I can remember, just being able to do consistent training, consistent racing. As bizarre as it sounds, that's the main objective now because you can't beat consistency moving forward."
