“AS soon as I landed it went ‘crack’, so I kind of knew straight way it was broken.”
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It happened in an instant, but the pain and frustration of a training incident that left Bathurst professional cyclist Mark Renshaw with a broken pelvis still remains.
The man who turned professional in 2004 was in the midst of his preparation for the new season, one in which he was determined to play a big role for his team Dimension Data.
But he was involved in a collision with a car during a training ride last Saturday. It means instead of sitting on his bike and getting valuable kilometres in his legs, he is sitting in a wheelchair.
“I just finished three hours riding, I met Kristina for a coffee in town and something to eat. I was just going to head back out for the final two hours and I don’t know why, I was just going through town to call into the bike shop to call in there for five minutes,” Renshaw explained.
“I sort of rolled up to the roundabout pretty slow, I was maybe only doing five kays an hour.
“I thought I was clear, but all of a sudden, just as I was about to exit the roundabout I got hit.
“It felt like it all happened in slow motion, but it was so quick I couldn’t do anything about it … I saw red and the next minute I was flying.
“My bike sort of hit the front of the car and ricocheted off to the right, but I hit the bonnet, went over the bonnet and flipped. As I’ve landed I sort of landed on my pelvis and that’s what did the damage.
“I couldn’t really stand up after it, they had to carry me off the middle of the road.
“It completely wrote off the bike … they are very stiff laterally, but if they take any sort of hit to the side they break pretty easy, so that was a bit of a shame.”
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Looking back on the incident six days later, and having discussed it with others, Renshaw acknowledges he was fortunate not to have been more seriously injured.
However, at the moment that does not really feel like any consolation.
Not only is it expected to sideline him for at least three months, but it will keep him from enjoying some of the things he had planned with his family over the Christmas period.
“It’s a big price to pay,” he said. “It’s going to hurt over Christmas, I’ve never had a setback in Australia, at this time of year I’m normally in the garden with the kids.
“I’d done my training quite early so I could do all the things I enjoy in Australia, having that taken away hurts.
“It hurts, it really hurts, this setback is probably the worst one I’ve had to deal with.”
Given that Renshaw has endured a number of setbacks during his career, that statement highlights just how frustrated he is at the moment.
Renshaw was sidelined for some two months at the start of the 2010 season after being diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus, while a crash at the Tour of Turkey in 2013 left him with a broken collarbone, broken tooth and concussion.
Even this year Renshaw had to overcome the frustration of chronic sinusitis and a broken talus after crashing in the Scheldeprijs.
As he is now 36, Renshaw is not certain how many more years he will continue on the world’s professional road cycling scene. That adds to the frustration of being sidelined.
His training was progressing nicely ahead of the Cycling Australia Road Nationals in early January and Australia’s UCI World Tour event – the Tour Down Under – which follows later that month.
Both those events would have seen Renshaw working with new members of the Dimension Data team – riders he can see potential in.
“I was already into serious training, I was probably a couple of weeks ahead of where I’d been the last few years. The focus this year was for a really big start to the season and hit the ground running,” he said.
“They’d made some changes to the team and I was pretty motivated to have a good start. My role would have been to step up and work with those new guys, kind of lead them.
“I was looking forward to racing in Australia because at this stage I’m not sure how many more years I’m going to do. I think it would’ve been my 17th Tour Down Under, they’d already contacted me about going down.
“I think I’ve already got the record, but 17 would’ve been two or three more than anyone else, so I was looking forward to going down to Adelaide and doing that.
“This time last year I had to have two operations on my sinuses, which is an issue which doesn’t come from a crash, not from something on the bike.
“So I had not my best year because of those problems, but having just come back from a training camp in South Africa with a good group of guys for next year and all the new gear, it was exciting.
“I came back and had just started to all my good training, I started to do all my sprint efforts and threshold efforts – three months, it’s going to be a lifetime.”
While Renshaw still has a long wait ahead of him before he once again gets to show the skills that have seen him dubbed the best lead out man in the peloton, his broken pelvis is expected to heal properly.
It did not require surgery either.
“They’ve said there should no problem with the healing at all. It’s not displaced the iliac bone, it’s just got a nice big crack right down through the middle of it,” Renshaw said.
“As long as look after myself the first two weeks there should be no problems with it.
“It will make me more hungry when I get back, yeah, but that’s the problem, I’ll have to take it easy.”
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Despite the pain and frustration, as well as the long recovery ahead of him, surprisingly Renshaw still looks at Bathurst motorists in a positive light.
Last Saturday’s crash was the first incident with a car that he has been involved over countless hours and kilometres he has put in on roads in the Bathurst area training each season.
“It’s my first run in with a car since I’ve been a cyclist. I’ve done a majority of my riding in my lifetime, although I spent most to the year overseas I do a big portion of my pre-season training here,” he said.
“I keep telling everyone that it’s one of the safest and the best places in Australia because the motorists here are tolerant and accepting, so I definitely can’t say anything bad about motorists in Bathurst.”