"I was T-boned by a car. Shattered my right knee into too many pieces to count" - Thomas Gloag's incredible story of year long recovery from surgeries to Czech Tour stage win

For twelve months, Team Visma | Lease a Bike prospect Thomas Gloag was a professional bike rider unable to ride his bike. Between his last outing of 2023 in San Sebastian and his return to racing at the 2024 Czech Tour, it's fair to day the Brit suffered a real nightmare.

"There's not really a timeline for how these things go. It just takes however long it takes. I was T-boned by a car and I shattered my right knee into too many pieces to count," recounts Gloag, who was a key part of Primoz Roglic's Maglia Rosa win at the 2023 Giro d'Italia, in conversation with Cycling Weekly. "I then had complete knee reconstruction surgery, spent six weeks in a wheelchair, and then had to learn to walk again and just basically reconfigure my body."

In fact, Gloag's injuries were so severe, that the now 22-year-old basically had to learn how to walk again, let alone get back riding his bike. "The biggest issue actually ended up being that my muscles had atrophied so much that I was basically just bone at that point," he recalls. "After six weeks of not using your quads, your quads start to atrophy in about 48 hours and I was six weeks without being able to bend my knee. Two weeks in, I still couldn't bend it, but they took my cast off, and I was able to shower."

"The first time I ever saw my leg at that point, I actually then fainted in the shower. I bent my knee, my girlfriend caught me and I was out for about a minute just at the sight of how much muscle I'd lost. I still had four weeks left of not being able to move it, so that was about as bad as it got," Gloag continues. "Once I started to get into the rehab, there was a big task ahead of just trying to reconfigure everything. But actually, from there, I had a really positive experience of just progress. I was fortunate enough to have a really, really good medical team and my coach Jarno Voorintholt around me."

Despite all the issues though, Gloag continued to keep a positive outlook throughout. "It's strange because don't get me wrong, it was an extremely difficult experience to go through, but it was also very, very rewarding," he explained. "I don't think I've ever done something that I've taken so much pride in just because the amount of progress you see on a day to day basis is remarkable. There's a really visual progress that you can track which I found really, really rewarding. To be honest I was also really really lucky with having good surgeons, good physios, and the team just gave me time. I feel super grateful that I was in a great situation to be able to handle not such a great situation."

That was then very emotionally rewarded with a stunning first professional win in his very first race back at the 2024 Czech Tour. "I had a few tears in my eyes because finally, I was feeling like a bike racer again. That was actually a bigger moment for me than winning the next day. In a strange way you would have thought that it would have been when I crossed the finish line first. But it was the day before just because I was proving to myself that I could ride hard on the knee in a race situation again," Gloag concludes. "The objectives for me now are really just getting some consistency. It's something that I've struggled with for as long as I can remember, just being able to do consistent training, consistent racing. As bizarre as it sounds, that's the main objective now because you can't beat consistency moving forward."