I don’t think I could race if I could remember the crash

RISING STAR CONN ON HIS RETURN FROM HORROR HEAD INJURY

CONN McDUNPHY remembers the rain and the top of the hill and nothing else.

He was racing near the Alps in the Arbent-Bourg-Arbent event last year when he hit a speed bump on a descent.

The next thing he remembers is waking up in the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Lyon.

“There’s about five or six hours there where I have no memory,” he says.

“The crash happened about four o’clock. I woke up around nine o’clock in a panic asking if the race was over.”

McDunphy hit a speed bump on the apex in the bend of a hairpin on a steep descent in wet conditions.

He crashed into the rider in front of him and then fell, hitting the back of his head on a concrete block by the side of the road.

“It missed the helmet unfortunately. My helmet was in perfect condition afterwards. Not a scratch on it,” he says.

If you think of the bones in your back, the vertebrae are numbered as you go down the spine: C1, C2, C3 and so on.

Severity

McDunphy cracked C0 and fractured his skull.

Not only that, such was the severity of the blow, some bone got lodged in his brain.

McDunphy was knocked out and his directeur sportif Nico Louis of French team Nogentsur-Oise initially thought he was dead.

“I was out cold and my DS thought I was… yeah it wasn’t good,” he says.

“In cycling crashes, the guy who’s screaming the loudest isn’t the problem. The guy who is lying on the floor saying nothing is the problem. That was me.

“I cracked my occipital condyle. I actually still have part of my occipital condyle lodged in my brain.

“So I probably should be dead. “But I’m not, so…happy days!” he adds, laughing.

When he woke up later that day, he was in Lyon, in a psychiatric ward due to overcrowding in the hospital from Covid.

“Probably where I belong, to be fair!” he says.

Manager

“I was in hospital for three or four days, I spent a week with the team manager in his home, then I flew home.

“I still have the bone in my brain where it shouldn’t be. But it’s solid now, it’s not going anywhere.

“The doctor in Beaumont said he only sees one person a year that this happens to.

“If I was a rugby or GAA player, pplayer, my career re would be over. o

“But because I’ I’m a cyclist, because it was such a freak accident, he said the likelihood is it will never happen again, so you’re safe to keep racing.

“The fact that I don’t remember anything is a blessing in a way, because going downhill in the rain would be one of the things that I’m best at.

“I think if I remembered how it happened, I don’t think I’d be the same. I don’t think I’d cycle.”

The crash happened just over a week after his greatest day in the saddle, when he won the elite men’s time trial at the Irish national championships.