The bravest comeback ever
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As a stream of Victoria Williamson’s blood oozed across the track, medics threw a small canopy around the stricken cyclist, as they might for a lame racehorse that had to be put down. “From what the crowd saw,” she says, “it looked near enough like I was dead.”
For anybody of a delicate disposition, her injuries were a dreadful sight. Such was the mayhem of her high-speed tangle with Dutch rival Elis Ligtlee, whose bike propelled her into a fence, she had broken her neck, back and pelvis, while sustaining a cut to her flank so deep that it exposed her bare spine.
The date was Jan 9, 2016, the occasion the Six Days of Rotterdam, which Williamson had hoped to use as a staging post en route to the Rio Olympics.
Instead, a few hours later, she found herself drifting in and out of consciousness at Rotterdam’s Erasmus University Medical Centre, where trauma doctors scurried to and from her bedside. Remarkably, a photograph of that moment, taken by Scottish rider Ellie Richardson, shows her smiling. In retrospect, she ascribes her expression to a dose of fentanyl, a painkiller up to 100 times stronger than morphine. For the news about to be imparted was anything but cheering.
“Rio’s off the cards now,” Richard Freeman, the British team doctor, told her. It was as gentle as he could have been. The opinion among the Erasmus specialists was that not only had Williamson’s Olympic dream evaporated, but her whole sporting career. “They believed I was fighting,” she reflects, “to lead any kind of normal life.” At the time, being just 22, she dismissed such prophecies as doom-laden. But each passing week, as she stared at the ceiling and adjusted to a neck brace that left her unable to sleep properly, would deliver a grimmer verdict. When nurses eventually lifted the angle of her bed a few degrees past horizontal, she passed out from the pain and disorientation.
What could she, in such a state, have best expected as a prognosis? The ability to stand upright? Perhaps to walk a few steps unaided? Somehow, we are here in a meeting room inside Manchester Velodrome, the headquarters of British Cycling, to toast a rather loftier triumph. A little over two years since the crash that left her millimetres from paralysis, Williamson has just been selected for next week’s World Track Championships in Pruszkow, Poland.
For a young woman whom most people expected never to step back on a bike again, even for a meander around the local park, it is a feat that defies credulity.
Sometimes in sport, those with the gravest injuries carve out second careers to fit their altered circumstances. One thinks, for example, of Alex Zanardi, the Formula One driver who lost both legs in an accident and who later reinvented himself as a hand-cyclist, winning four Paralympic gold medals. The difference with Williamson is that even after a shattering episode that has recast every aspect of her life, she has returned to the heart of elite competition. When she looks back to the start of her rehabilitation, she cannot help but be astonished.
“As I had done nothing for a year and gone through all the surgery and trauma, my body just wasn’t adapted,” she says. “Everything had tightened, the muscles had shortened. I had to put on five to six kilos of muscle. I had a limp. The coaches and physios had quite a job on their hands.
“I never thought I would even walk straight again, let alone compete internationally.”
To put her recovery into perspective, David Smith, the Paralympic cyclist, underwent six months of intensive rehab at Bisham Abbey to treat the paralysing effects of a tumour. It was a programme of record length, until Williamson beat it with nine months. “They would check everything there: my resting heart rate, my urine samples, the sleep watch I had worn the night before. It was a case of rebuilding everything, little and often. I would have a set mobility routine five times a day, to enable me even to start to train.”
Her physical improvements have been startling, but there have been periods of psychological turmoil. It is a reflection of Williamson’s honesty that, rather than simply extolling the virtues of human resilience, she does not shy away from such lows.
“People don’t see the worst of it, but there were times in hospital when I would cry myself to sleep. The tears don’t mean that you’re not coping. It’s just a way of getting the emotion out. If you don’t tell people how you’re feeling, it becomes too much.
“I cried numerous times in front of all the staff at Bisham, too. It allows you to get support. If you fight it all the time, then everyone presumes that you’re OK.”
As Williamson eats her lunch, a modest mid-training portion of breaded fish, new potatoes and peas, I steer her briefly away from these recollections of anguish.
Changing the subject to her wedding to Oliver Barnes, a professional golfer from her home city of Norwich, and the blogs she wrote as a bride-to-be, I ask whether married life has provided an escape.
“Actually, it’s a bit awkward,” she says, prodding nervously at her food. “I’ve just separated from him.
We split not long after I returned to Manchester. When I was at Bisham, I would be away Monday to Friday, and sometimes I didn’t even come back at weekends because I was super-tired. Unfortunately, my husband found someone else. We tried to work things out, but we had just grown apart. I had become a different person, and I think he had, and we went our separate ways.”
A break-up and a complex convalescence do not, she acknowledges, make for a happy cocktail. “Another bump in the road,” she sighs. “That was why, last year, I didn’t start racing as early as I could have. Emotionally, I was coming to terms with everything. It took a massive toll. I had the feeling of having to start again, and that’s a bit scary, when you have been with someone for seven years. From the age of 18, it was all I had known, so it took me a while to get my head around it. The sporting environment is highpressure enough. When you throw in outside issues, they’re going to have a huge impact. Thankfully, things are looking up for me now. I just hope this is the last of a bad run.” Williamson looks young, even for 25. When she discusses life beyond velodromes, she appears joyously unburdened. She enthuses about her love of coffee, meeting friends, even about the advert she has recently posted for a flatmate on SpareRoom (to share “a lovely new-build terraced house in Cheadle”, if anyone is looking). But the ordeals she has had to surmount at so tender an age are heavy. As a consequence of her injuries, she has been told that she cannot have a normal birth. “If I was to have children, which I would do in the future, then it would have to be by Caesarean. My pelvis was torn apart and had to be put back together, so it just wouldn’t open in order to give birth. I’ll deal with it further down the line.” A myopia can take hold of the best track cyclists, a tendency to regard life purely as a sequence of trials and championships. It is not a danger to which Williamson, post-crash, is likely to fall prey. For all that she is euphoric about her call-up to the squad for Pruszkow, she carries sufficient scars to recognise that these accomplishments are not, ultimately, what define her. “I have had a lot of stuff thrown at me over the past three years,” she explains. “I would say that my personality has changed, that I’ve become more open-minded towards others, more empathetic. Before, I had my eyes on the prize, and that was an Olympic medal. But my purpose in this life is not just to ride a bike. I have a new outlook, knowing that this isn’t the be-all and end-all.”
At the time of the Rio Games, Williamson was tormented. Besides the gold rush of her cycling peers, Ligtlee, with whom she had collided on that terrible day in Rotterdam, took gold in her event, the keirin. It all sharpened the sense, in her mind, of an opportunity cruelly denied. Against that backdrop, one might suppose that selection for next summer’s Tokyo Olympics would mark the perfect catharsis in her story. Except that she views such a prospect less as a reward for her than for those – not least her mother, her best friend Helen Scott, and a small legion of coaches – who have brought her to this point. “I would like to achieve it for everyone else, even more so than for me,” she says. “I’m willing to do everything I can to finish off this chapter with something I can remember.”
What Williamson perhaps does not realise yet, as her agonies at last give way to hope, is quite how memorable she is already.
‘People don’t see the worst of it but there were times in hospital when I cried myself to sleep. The tears do not mean you’re not coping. It’s a way of getting emotion out’