INTERVIEW: MATT LLOYD
Following his untimely retirement from the sport, the 2010 Giro d’Italia King of the Mountains Matt Lloyd disappeared from the radar of cycling fans. Sophie Smith inds that the Australian has faced horri ic adversity in the form of a hit- and- run inciden
The 201o Giro KoM winner talks about the hit-and-run that almost killed him
Australian cyclist Matt Lloyd disappeared from the sport without a trace in 2014. The quirky Victorian seemingly overnight was gone from racing, from the sport, from the internet and unavailable to press trying to solve what until now was a cold case.
Lloyd’s career was already hanging in the balance when Jelly Belly-Maxxis threw the former climber a lifeline to compete domestically in the United States through 2014. That year he’d arrived at the Tour of Utah with designs on the race but didn’t start due to a treated illness. It was all secondary after what happened next.
Lloyd had walked out of a Cedar City transit hotel to get food when he was struck by a car in a hit-and-run that almost killed him. The physical and psychological repercussions were such that only now – four years later – is Lloyd ready to speak publicly of it.
The 35-year-old is dressed smart casual and appears to be physically fit by normal standards when he walks into a coffee shop in Melbourne. Once, he might have cycled to the downtown area, but today he has a faint sweat on his forehead from navigating public transport.
Lloyd was the King of the Mountains in the 2010 Giro d’Italia, and took a stage win along the way, riding for OmegaPharmaLotto (now Lotto Soudal). He’d flashed on to the radar a few days before we meet, reconnecting and posting old race photos of himself on social media. We sit down on a pair of stools at the buzzing espresso bar for an hour-long interview that turns a proposed postcycling story of everyday life into a tale of survival and loss.
“It was on the sixth of August. I had a flight the next morning, heading from, I think it was St George, back to Denver, before the Tour of Colorado. I’d gone to the hotel and all the flights that I could have taken that day were either full or had been pre-booked for other people going back to Denver. I eventually got one for the next morning that was to leave at 6.30am or some ridiculous hour,” Lloyd begins.
“I arrived at the hotel and there was no restaurant or food service, so I went to the reception and asked where the closest place to get food was. They said, ‘If you turn left outside the reception, a few hundred metres past this intersection there are a couple of places you can get something to eat.’ I walked up to the intersection, there were a lot of road works and stuff happening at that time, and as you do, you look in both directions and make sure nothing is coming. It was about a quarter to 10 at night,” he continues.
“And then all I can remember was waking up and the helicopter pilot was down on his knees saying, ‘Do you have health insurance?’ “Five-and-a-half or six days later
I woke up again. They’d had to place me in an induced coma. I remember waking up in the hospital and had all the apparatus attached. I thought to myself, ‘This wasn’t the hotel room I was supposed to be waking up in.’”
TRAUMA AND REHABILITATION
Lloyd believes the driver that left him shattered, and with a brain injury he doesn’t detail, was a scholarship student late for a curfew.
“The guy had driven home, told his brother he’d hit what he thought was some kind of animal. But his brother went to check out the car and there were parts of my jumper and parts of me on the vehicle,” Lloyd recounts. “He called the police and said, ‘I think my brother has hit someone,’ and it pieced together. He [the driver] ended up getting charged and was sent to prison.”
Perhaps for the first time ever, Lloyd’s eight-year pro cycling career was a minor consideration. His immediate recovery was spent in two American hospitals until he was passed fit enough to return to Australia for further hospitalisation and hip surgery.
“Both legs were broken. Both hips were smashed. I think the thoracic spine from T5 to T8 shattered. There were nine ribs that were broken, lacerations to the liver, spleen and stomach. Fractured skull and the brain injury, of course. Both collarbones were broken as well,” says Lloyd. I suggest he’s lucky to be alive, and he laughs nervously.
“It was pretty much a full job. The hardest thing in the first stages was the stomach damage and internal injuries - they don’t allow you to eat anything.
“It was like being in a body suit for the first two weeks, not being able to move. Then I was moved to a trauma rehab centre and they started to introduce some manageable movement and therapy to get the body somewhat active again.”
The 2008 Australian road champion spent around eight weeks in the States
Both legs were broken. Both hips were smashed. The thoracic spine from T5 to T8 shattered. Nine ribs were broken, lacerations to the liver, spleen and stomach. Fractured skull and the brain injury
and returned to Australia when the brain injury was stable.
The general rehabilitation process was exhausting, and he separated from his wife in the middle of it.
“One of the things that made me more frustrated than anything else was the maintenance of appointments. You become like a robot. It would be almost daily. I’d have a different appointment with a different physio or therapist and because it was so continual and going for so long, it was really draining,” he says. “Through the whole [of] 2015 basically I was just learning how to function again. Traumatic brain injuries have only been identified as a major problem in sports the last couple of years. I witnessed it from a motor vehicle accident perspective, which is more upfront and abrasive in a way.”
ROLLERCOASTER CAREER
Lloyd’s cycling career was rollercoaster enough. The 2010 Giro was his big breakthrough, but bad luck was waiting for him. Later that year, Lloyd was hit by a car when he was out riding around Melbourne. He suffered spine and shoulder injuries.
A five-year tenure with Lotto then ended abruptly in April 2011. The management cited behavioural reasons: “Recent incidents during the first races disputed in 2011 by Matthew for our team made this collaboration impossible,” a Lotto statement explained.
Lloyd signed with Lampre in 2012 and competed at the Tour de France but was forced to withdraw after scans confirmed a broken elbow. He barely raced in 2013 due to persistent injuries.
“The initial phases with Lampre were really good. It started in an ideal fashion back here. I came second to Gerro [Simon Gerrans] at the national championships and then went to Down Under and everyone was racing really well,” he recalls. “I was still dealing with the spinal injuries I had [from the 2010 collision]. One of the focus points I make to people these days is that if you do have an injury, you have to give yourself the due diligence to make sure you’re on top of it instead of just smashing through it. The moment
you start to do that, it can potentially turn out to be catastrophic.
“It’s like my second year with Lampre, I ended up not being able to race after halfway through the year [March – ed.] because the spine injury was just so bad.”
Jelly Belly-Maxxis was a drop in level for Lloyd but one he took, certain he wasn’t ready for retirement despite significant interruptions to training and racing.
“I still had a good relationship with the sport particularly having seen the different variety of racing from Europe,” he recalls. “The more simplistic set-up of it in the US was a bit different for me but I didn’t really have any negativity towards it. I was still happy to be a part of it and wasn’t really looking to step away from it that quickly. But what unfolded forced me to.”
REBUILDING IN RETIREMENT
Lloyd’s demeanour changes whenever the conversation turns to his cycling career. He looks up when he talks about it as if in wonder, unable to suppress a small smile.
“I haven’t detached myself completely from the world of cycling,” he says.
Up until now, this interview has been different. Lloyd the racer had the eccentric style of a deep thinker. He would sometimes provide leftfield answers to questions with a drawl interrupted by long pauses. His disposition left you uncertain as to whether his responses were designed to purely entertain, were poignant or deflective. Now he is pragmatic, clearly spoken and sequential.
“It’s not even the victories that people expect, say the national championships or winning the climber’s jersey in the Giro, or racing the Tour and the Olympics,” he says of his career highlights.
“To me, it was more the camaraderie I’d get from different team-mates and just the pure chaos of it all. How, when people have the champagne bottle at the dinner table, an expected subtle shake to uncork the thing ends up going crazy and destroying the restaurant.”
It’s when Lloyd begins to consider the lowlights of his old occupation that you see glimpses of that confounding racer and interview subject return.
“That feeds into the low points that I had,” he continues. “I think it was in my first Giro, I was halfway through a pretty long, flat stage and I was wondering to myself, ‘What if I was to just slow down for a second and let the entire peloton and convoy go past me? The sag wagon and everything roll past, just go unnoticed.’
“I ended up going back past the last ambulance, which is normally the last vehicle of the convoy. Then, fortunately, the director Roberto Damiano got on the radio and said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I thought, ‘Oh, at least someone noticed.’ He asked what it was about, and I said I just wanted to check out.
“It exemplified the solitude that athletes of any kind can go through, even though I might be in an event that is meant to be the pinnacle of the sport,” Lloyd continues.
“If there are no spectators around no-one notices because there is no camera taking pictures of the back of the last car in the convoy. Then you really are alone. That was interesting.”
Lloyd has worked with the Australian Olympic Committee as a mentor to young athletes, some who competed at the October Youth Olympics. He’s studying and in terms of cycling has done a bit of amateur coaching.
You get a sense that the eight-time grand tour rider has only just really reawakened from what happened in Utah. There is no set method as to how he has sustained himself over the past four years.
“It’s certainly had its mega challenges whether that be having the support from family and my wife at the time, technically still my wife now, or going through difficult periods and still being able to survive and make things work,” he says.
Accepting retirement compounded it all. Lloyd had to make the daunting transition from the entitlement professional sport provides, to gritty, real world reality. Physically, he didn’t have a choice.
“When people around you are saying it’d be dangerous to race again because if you do get another brain injury then you’ll be a vegetable, it makes it easy to call it quits,” he says.
“A quarter of the way through 2015, I started to get on a stationary bike at home, mainly to build general fitness. When I did
To me, it was more the camaraderie I’d get from different team-mates and just the pure chaos of it all
end up back on the road, doing social rides, I was almost hyper aware of things that I’d been relatively careless about previously. After that I was able to be at least settled in, not pushing myself, not wanting to get back and ride the Tour or the Giro again.” Psychologically it was different.
“It’s only been the last six months speaking to various physicians, a lot of them having worked with the Australian Football League or National Basketball Association, that I’ve realised things that cause drama and depression for athletes, particularly when they finish their career in any sense, they go from such a bubble - always travelling, always having something to do, very goal orientated - to just having nothing,” Lloyd continues.
“That coming about through injury, whether that is neurological or physical, adds some more complexity to it. All the guys that have been helping me out said there is a lot of unpacking you’ve got to do, grieving in a way that you probably wouldn’t have let yourself do in 2015 and 2016 because sportspeople breed a type of personality that doesn’t let anything in.”
In 2018, Lloyd appears to be letting people, if not cycling, back in. He developed an interest in sports psychology through his ordeal and recovery and has taken that further. Currently he is studying an online pre-med course: “I became a master trainer in the physical field, which involves all the certifications of a personal trainer,” he tells Procycling.
A full-time return to cycling in any capacity may be outside his remit for now, but Lloyd is focused forward on something more precious – a future.
“The Davis brothers [former pros Allan and Scott] used to say, ‘We’re here for a good time, not a long time,’ and that sums it up. In an ideal world I would still be out there racing this year. Considering what did unfold, being still alive and looking forward to another chapter in my life,” he says, “I’m pretty stoked with it all.”
Considering what did unfold, being still alive and looking forward to another chapter in my life, I’m pretty stoked with it all