Berwick proves crash hot in Nassau
EVEN when Brisbane’s Sebastian Berwick woke from two days in a coma with multiple bone breaks, two punctured lungs and nerve damage, he never considered quitting on the cycling dream that led him to his first medal for Australia yesterday.
This 17-year-old kid’s relish with time trial bronze at the Commonwealth Youth Games in the Bahamas is testament to the hard knocks of the journey being as satisfying as the colour of the final reward.
Sunday’s road race will give him another medal shot while Hobart’s Madeleine Fasnacht will try to win her individual time trial gold with more booty in the women’s road race on the flat coastal course.
Just walking, showering without a chair and being painfree again was Berwick’s world immediately after a horror crash around his 14th birthday in 2013 when he needed five blood transfusions.
“When I woke up in hospital never did ‘quit’ enter my mind or in those first couple of weeks when my co-ordination was out and I lost a lot of muscle,” Berwick said. “I didn’t have in my mind at the time that I could get this far but when I started to mend, I was motivated to do something.
“It’s taken three years to advance to my first Australian team and I want to train for more.”
The crashes of the elite Tour de France are televised to the world. Berwick’s was worse just riding home from a club cycling meet when he hit a pothole about 2km from his home in the Brisbane suburb of Wishart.
“I can’t remember the three minutes before the crash but I hit a pothole, popped the front tyre, crashed into a ute and ended up in an induced coma,” he said.
He still has some loss of feeling below the left shoulder but the 15, or is it 16, bone breaks in ribs, collarbone and his spine healed while he pushed ahead with studies at Mansfield State High.