Tao Geoghegan Hart knew his Giro d’Italia was finished almost as soon as he hit the floor. He was not alone by the roadside — the half-dried descent of Colla di Boasi was strewn with the best the race had to offer — but as Geraint Thomas and Primoz Roglic collected themselves and rode on, Geoghegan Hart removed his helmet and stared at the grey spring sky. The upper part of his left femur was broken into six pieces.
“I felt the exact nature of it,” says Geoghegan Hart, who had started that morning of the 11th stage five seconds shy of the race leader Thomas, his Ineos Grenadiers team-mate. “There were a few moments where I really wanted to stand up, really wanted to try and get on my bike, the only few seconds when there was any question of, ‘What if?’ From that moment, it was over. I think that helps a lot. Thinking something is not as bad as it is can be quite heartbreaking.”
Loaded into an ambulance bound for the Villa Scassi hospital in Genoa, Geoghegan Hart found little relief. “An hour on bumpy Italian roads,” he says. “It was one of the hardest hours of my life. I was quite angry. You anticipate that the medicine is going to be wonderful . . . not enough . . . I envisaged when I was getting into the ambulance that it was going to be calm, but it was quite bad. Potholes and bouncing around. I could feel everything moving for hours. I was on the phone to my girlfriend and my family, which helped a bit. I was more coherent than I’d liked to have been.”
And all this after Geoghegan Hart, 28, had worked himself into the condition of his life. In February, he ended a 2½-year victory drought — stretching back to his overall win at the 2020 Giro — at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana. In April, he sealed consecutive stages and the general classification at the Tour of the Alps.
When the Giro began on May 6 at Fossacesia Marina, he was among the top three or four contenders for the Pink Jersey. Had it not been for 19 seconds lost behind a crash on day two, Geoghegan Hart, rather than Thomas, would have moved into the overall lead when Remco Evenepoel withdrew because of Covid after the ninth stage.
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“It felt like the race hadn’t really begun and I was holding back,” he says. “It was what we’d spoken about since January: the only thing that was going to matter was the last three stages and that it would flip on its head, which transpired . . . That’s probably the only regret I have. I just didn’t feel like I’d really shown what was in the tank.”
In Genoa, he was sent for scans and each time he was moved, the broken bone shifted. “To do a scan you had to go off the accident and emergency bed. To go out of the ambulance you had to change beds. It was all awful,” he says. “There is no way to mitigate that. You can’t perfectly lift everything at once.”
The fractures in his leg had caused profound internal bleeding and he required emergency surgery. He had two pins inserted, several screws and a tie around the main part of the break. Despite the seeming cruelty of it, Geoghegan Hart repeatedly describes himself as lucky: lucky that there was no ambiguity and he could move on without doubt, lucky that the bleeding was severe enough to necessitate the emergency operation, and lucky that his femoral artery was not damaged.
“They saw the extent of the internal bleeding and they called all these amazing surgeons in,” he says. “I had the surgery between 8 and 9[pm]. And the crash was about 2 or 3 . . . then there was no waiting around, no night or multiple nights of being in agony. The surgery was done by 2am.
“I think I lost two to three units of blood. All internal bleeding. I don’t want to go past my knowledge here but, as an elite athlete, one of the things you spend thousands of hours a year doing is increasing the capillarisation of your muscle. That makes you aerobically more efficient but it means if that muscle is then cut by the bones, you are going to have more bleeding.
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“The Italian surgeon told us about moving all the muscles out of the way to do the operation. They had a 78-year-old that had fallen off his bike a few days later, the same surgeon, same thing, but it’s a very different operation with the level of muscle and fat mass.”
For 12 days, Geoghegan Hart ― his leg “four or five times its normal size”, swollen with fluid and transfused blood ― stared at a spot 10ft high on the opposite wall, where there were two Rawlplugs and an unused power socket. “There obviously used to be a TV there, but there wasn’t any more,” he says.
Mercifully, he had the company of his mother and his girlfriend’s mother, who had travelled to Italy to watch the race. He managed to watch the “heartbreaking” penultimate stage time-trial, when Thomas surrendered the lead to Roglic. Otherwise, he began the day at 6am with blood tests and antibiotics and filled it thereafter by planning his recuperation.
Before his injury, Geoghegan Hart had spoken regularly to Vivianne Miedema — the Arsenal forward, a team-mate of his girlfriend Lotte Wubben-Moy — about her recovery from a torn ACL. Still in Genoa, he decided that Miedema’s was a surer template for his recovery than the typical cyclist’s method (back on the bike, quick as you can).
“An 85-year-old who struggles to walk unassisted, chances are they can sit on an indoor bike and turn their legs. It’s the best rehab tool there is,” he explains. “That being as it is and cyclists being as they are, means they just jump straight back on the bike. And most pros — but not all — love riding their bikes. One of the mistakes I’ve made in my career is doing more than I need to because I like being out on my bike.”
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It would be nearly five months before he rode seriously again. Not since he first rolled through London Fields, aged three, had he resisted the temptation for so long.
Geoghegan Hart began the long return journey to normality with his family in London. The muscles of his left leg — “everything attached to the femur, all of the quad, some of my outer hip” — had been frozen by the trauma; he could not lift it from his bed. “It was pretty bizarre having someone move it around for the first time,” he says.
So accustomed to constant motion, his legs soon bored of the stillness, and for weeks he woke to their involuntary contraction. “It felt like my brain was checking they [my legs] were working,” he says. “It was painful, it wasn’t a nice way to wake up. It was still a few months after the crash that I was waking up a lot in the night and not sleeping well.”
After 2½ weeks, Wubben-Moy drove him to Amsterdam, where he based himself at the sports medicine and training facility FysioMed. There, he could clock in daily and socialise with other athletes. Wubben-Moy, 24, stayed for a week but then had to travel to Australia with England for the World Cup.
His rehab started at 9am and finished between 1pm and 2pm. In the early stages, he had hot-water therapy — using a GameReady machine — to improve the mobility of his knee before an hour and a half of physio, which involved manipulation and massage of soft tissue and the fascia, which covers muscles. “Your kneecap needs to glide as you bend your leg and it just wouldn’t move because everything was so tight,” he says. “So they would be doing this manual therapy, forcing the knee joint to expand. It was very draining. I never sleep in the afternoons usually, or feel glued to the sofa, no matter what I’ve done training-wise. And on some of the harder days I was really out of it in the afternoon.”
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It took two months of this physio before his leg could cover a normal range of motion: each day they would gain three to five degrees of movement; each night they would lose two to three; the next morning they started afresh. He had podiatry twice a week to further loosen his feet and ankles, gait analysis to ensure he was walking normally, and osteopathy.
Stiffness was only part of the problem. “There was a lot of muscle wastage,” he says. From around week six, he started to put a “very light amount of pressure into the foot”; from week ten, still on crutches, he increased the load again; and from week 12, he was down to one or no crutch. “One of the things that gets a lot of the muscles working again, that helps with the swelling, is bearing weight,” he explains. “You see how the muscles change visually.”
To regain muscle mass, Geoghegan Hart used blood-flow restriction training, a form of resistance work with a pressurised cuff. “[It] would go right at the top of my leg, where the break was, so I only started it after eight weeks once the x-ray had cleared me,” he says. “You do very light weight exercises — leg extension, squats — and you get a similar training effect to high-load gym exercise. The blood can’t get in and out of the muscle. It’s quite uncomfortable. The leg extension, doing five kilos, and you start and it feels so easy, and you’re doing 75 reps in total, split 30, 15, 15, 15, and the last two it is impossible to straighten the leg. With five kilos!”
Other than riding 20 minutes to and from the centre on a Brompton, he avoided cycling. “All of the footballers were riding the bikes and taking the piss out of me because I was like, ‘I’m not riding the bike’, and they said ‘But you’re the cyclist.’ I said ‘I’m not going on it’ . . . They were adamant I was crazy. But if I had jumped on at that time, I would’ve been producing power in a different way to normal because there wasn’t the strength there. You’re teaching your leg to do the thing you don’t want it to do.”
Although Geoghegan Hart is a Londoner, he spends most of the year racing in Europe or training in Andorra. World Tour teams generally do not have a central training facility, and outside of camps, most work is done alone, or in ad-hoc groups, and analysed online. “I live in the middle of nowhere,” he says. In normal circumstances, he starts the day with a 30-minute run in the forest near his flat — “the fresh mountain morning air, I love that” — but the injury presented him with a chance to live in a different way.
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“One day I went to the Rijksmuseum with friends and by the end of it I was knackered,” he says. “It’s incredible how weak the underneath of your feet get when you haven’t put any weight through them for two months.
“My girlfriend’s father’s family are Dutch so I was doing Dutch lessons. After ten years out of education, it’s quite an adjustment to go back into learning in a structured way on a video call . . . [but] having these different things going on is how you enable yourself to look back on a period which could be very static and empty as full and vibrant and different to my normal life.”
At the end of September, Geoghegan Hart rode his bike for 2½ hours and so brought that phase to a close. One day, he’d like to study. For now, “normal” life, in all its single-mindedness, is calling. “Cycling at this level is finite,” he says. “I’ve been a professional for ten years and it’s flown by. And I definitely don’t have another ten years ahead of me. It’s all about getting back to the level I was in May and doing the most with what I can.”
To do so, he will have to adapt to a new team, Lidl-Trek, with whom he has signed a three-year deal after seven seasons with Ineos. “It felt like a moment to try,” he says. “I was quite open with Ineos and I think they understood . . . cycling is getting more and more competitive every year. You want to be at the big races and have a shot. I don’t think I would ever regret not doing something results-wise but I think not giving it a go is what you would regret.”
In his one Tour de France appearance, he was involved in a crash on the first day and finished 60th. “Those are the things you want to change,” he says. And, recovery permitting, he is likely to have the chance next July, in a Tour which –– with Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, Roglic and Evenepoel all set to lead different teams –– could feature one of the strongest fields ever assembled. “There is a big push towards the Tour [from the team]. That is exciting, it’s really motivating.”
The road to France begins on Sunday ― Guy Fawkes Night ― when he always begins his winter training. For the past month, he has been gently working at his weight, though it’s no real concern. “I’ve been far more excessive in my off-season than I’ve ever dreamt of in the last five months,” he says. And then, it’s tempting to write that the real graft begins, but Geoghegan Hart would disagree. “It’s [been] five months of cumulative work. You keep chipping away at it. Because you never achieve anything in a day, whether that’s on your bike or forcing your knee to bend more.”
