PEDAL TO THE METTLE

You’ve shown incredible resilience coming back from crashes and Epstein-Barr and the mental effects that being out of competition must bring. What are the most important things when it comes to recovery, both physical and mental?

The hardest thing has been dealing with the pressure from people that are ignorant to those physical and mental effects. Whether they be media, rivals, or others involved in the sport. At the end of the day, I’m human, not a machine. If a watch has a mechanical fault or loses a second, it can be fixed and immediately works like nothing had happened. A human body obviously needs time to get over the illness or injury, and time for rehabilitation. Add to that the fact that top level sport is all about performing at the absolute peak of your capacity — a capacity level that will have taken a number of years to build up in order to even reach that point in the first place — it therefore means that coming back from zero, of course, can take a while.

I’m just incredibly lucky I’ve got a small amount of wonderful people around me: family, friends, sponsors, that have shown support and faith and reminded me of what I can achieve when I’m at