7 THINGS I LEARNED FROM BREAKING MY FACE

When a crash left CW's Tom Davidson with a titanium plate in his cheek, his perspective on cycling started to change. Here's what he took away from the saga

- Tom Davidson

Earlier this year, I lived out one of my mum’s worst nightmares. It happened in an instant. I had cycled to the cinema to meet a friend, and while we were watching the film, the weather outside turned stormy. The wind gusts, I thought, would blow me home effortlessly. The ride lasted less than two minutes.

At the first corner – a sharp, wet lefthander – my front wheel slid violently, jackknifing my bike into the tarmac. I don’t remember the impact. All I remember is being scraped off the floor by three men with panicked expressions, who kept asking me if I was OK. Proudly, I shooed them away, but the throbbing in my face, the pain in my wrist, and the general dizziness I felt made it clear to me that I was not, in fact, OK.

The nurse in A&E helped me piece together the crash. My left cheek had hit the road, hard, and was now as flat as the tarmac it had bounced off. A CT scan confirmed three fractures in my face, plus a broken wrist, and I was booked in for emergency surgery 48 hours later. This would stop my “eye material” from “sagging” through the broken cheekbone, which sounded like a good idea. Today, a small titanium plate holds it all in place, and will do so for the rest of my life.

Crashes in cycling can be life-altering. They can drastically change our relationship with the bike, knock back our confidence, and leave us with lasting scars, a constant reminder of our own fragility. Mine, fortunately, aren’t visible. The surgeons did the whole procedure through the inside of my mouth, making the incision in my gum line. They never told me how many stitches they put in, but I counted seven or eight with my tongue.