"The sky is only the limit for me" - Michael Valgren back on track after lengthy and painful recovery process

Michael Valgren is back to racing and has found a second wind to his career. The Dane has overcome very serious injuries suffered almost one year ago, and is back to racing after recovering from a broken pelvis and risk of suffering from necrosis.

“When you take a step away from cycling and you’re not part of it, you really find out how much you miss it. It’s not even just the racing part, but it’s being away at a race, all the gossip and banter with your teammates. I really missed being a part of that lately," Valgren told CyclingWeekly. “Honestly it was just like a double blow. First of all the crash was obviously not ideal with the injuries I had and the outcome of that. Then I had to miss the Tour start in Denmark, something we’ll probably never experience again."

A crash at La Route d'Occitanie ended his season in June, but his career was at high risk of ending. He hadn't raced more, but EF Education-EasyPost has signed him into the development team where he could continue his career, or at least have the opportunity.

"At the start it was just completely miserable, I felt like there was nothing good to take away from it. Okay, I could maybe come back but I really wasn’t sure," he continues. "I was just in so much pain for the first month of it all. I spent two weeks in the hospital before I got home. I stayed for three nights in Carcassonne and then ten days in Nice where I had my surgery before I then got back to Monaco."  

"As time moved on things just weren’t getting better. Two months went past, then three and it was around September when I really started to doubt I could come back. That’s when I cracked the first time," the Dane admits. "I just started to cry and said to myself I’m not ready to stop, it’s not how I want to stop, I want to stop when I feel like I don’t want to continue, not like this.”  

He reported that after a second surgery, he finally regained mobility in his knee which allowed him to ride the bike pain free, six months later. Ever since he has managed to regain some rhythm, the 31-year old returned to racing at the Région Pays de la Loire Tour where, this year, he is able to race with his teammates from the elite team due to the regulations of the development teams - he can race outside of World Tour events.

“It was only really March when I was able to train like I normally would have done before I had my first race… I had to remember to be realistic in that race with what I could achieve," he explains. "I couldn’t expect to win the first one, but I was in the game, I was part of it and not just a passenger which was super nice. Then the same thing happened again at the Tour of Norway."

Valgren has since put on 11 days of racing including the recent Tour of Norway, but also the 1.2 GP Herning where, although in modest competition, he finished third. A motivating sign for a rider who had for months feared he may not be in the peloton ever again.

“It’s an old saying but what doesn’t kill you can only make you stronger. That 100% applies in this situation. I had to work way harder to get back to normal than what I did just to be a bike rider. I always tried to think ‘ok, I’ve suffered a lot more than I am now’ when I was starting back on the bike.

He compares his comeback to those who Lizzie Deignan who he recently rode with and talked through her recent return from second pregnancy, and Remco Evenepoel who sustained similar injuries at the 2020 edition of Il Lombardia. “It’s people like her (Lizzie Deignan, ed.) and people like Remco [Evenepoel] who had a bad crash that I can kind of look up to and say well if they can do it, I can do it too you know. The sky is only the limit for me," he concluded.