From top form to toppled

After starting the year full of hope for the season ahead, elite road racer Bethany Taylor had her cardiovascular health wiped out by Covid-19

- Bethany Taylor

It was early March and the coronavirus – not yet declared a pandemic – seemed a relatively distant threat. For most of us, daily life was still largely unaffected. Twentytwo-year-old Bianchi Dama rider Bethany Taylor had just returned from a short stay with a team-mate and was looking forward to the season ahead.

“I was in the best form I’ve had in quite a few years,” Taylor tells me over Skype from her home in Newport, Wales. “Three or four days after getting home, I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t feel too well,’ but it just felt like a mild cold, so I kept on training.”

For the next week, Taylor carried on riding as usual – and then suddenly her symptoms escalated.

“I remember it clearly,” she says. “I’d done a four-hour ride the day before, and it hit me like a ton of bricks; I felt so bad. Covid-19 suddenly felt very real – before then, I hadn’t really known much about it.”

It soon became clear this was no ordinary cold or flu.

“I never usually feel dizzy, but the next day as I was making breakfast I began to feel really dizzy, then literally blacked out and dropped to the kitchen floor.”

Debilitating downturn

From best form in years to slumped on the kitchen floor; it was a disconcerting nosedive in physical condition for the elite racer – and it was about to get even worse.

“For the next couple of days I was feeling tight-chested and having headaches, but it still didn’t seem particularly bad – until the breathing problem worsened.”

As someone with exceptional cardiovascular fitness, Taylor could not have prepared herself for the precipitous decline in exercise tolerance.