By Louise Hickey
Six weeks after Irish champion Imogen Cotter was struck by a driver while cycling in Spain she has received good news from the medics looking after her. The Clare woman had an MRI scan yesterday and has been told her damaged knee will fully heal.
Furthermore, while she was particularly concerned about the damage done to the cartilage in her injured knee, the latest checks have confirmed the tissue remains and that there is also no lasting damage to her tendons or ligaments.
A very relieved Cotter, who is a contracted pro rider with Plantur-Pura this year, has told stickybottle she is fully focused on her recovery and has already set goals for the end of the year. While does not want to burden herself with very specific targets, she still has big aspirations to represent Ireland in the second half of the season.
“I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t go for selection for the Worlds or Euros in September. I don’t see why that would be a problem. I’ve never shied away from the fact that my big aim is to represent Ireland, so I’m definitely going to go for that”.
But first she was targeting a return
with her trade team, with which she secured a contract after winning the national
road race title in Wicklow last year.
“As soon as I’m able to go racing with the team I want to help the girls out as much as I can, I don’t see why I should limit myself. If anything, this experience is making me stronger”.
For now, she is physically weaker, but she feels if she could survive the “agonising” pain of the collision she can tolerate anything. Cotter explains that her pain threshold has completely changed and that “you know, even small things like plucking my eyebrows, for example, I just don’t even feel it”.
She thinks pushing threshold watts up a mountain will be easier, just by thinking: “Well, what have I been through before this?”
Cotter fully immersed herself in physio as soon as her leg cast was removed two weeks ago. She goes to a specialist knee physio in Girona every day, working through a range of movements. Then she attends more physio for the rest of her body two or three days a week, mainly targeting her arm as she broke her radius and ulna. She is using her time to swim and also to ride on the home trainer just using her left leg.
“I’m not doing exercise, what it feels
like to me is that I’m just reminding my body of what it is to cycle,” she said.
Being able to swim is helping her mentally. She explains that she can move her leg and wrist through the water, without the risk of being injured, saying “it feels really good to be able to be a bit breathless after I’ve finished working out”.
One of Plantur-Pura’s sponsors
this year, Zwift, has provided Cotter with equipment to help her training. She
was given a Wahoo Kicker and Apple TV for its cycling app.
Thanks to her rehabilitation, Cotter can now move her wrist. She also works a coach, as well as a being a pro cyclist, and being more mobile again means she has now just been able to resume her coaching.
She said was very thankful for all the help she has received during this time in her career. That includes a GoFundMe fundraising appeal set up by her new housemate in Girona, Alina Jäger. The fundraiser has raised €25,705, which is helping with the costs of her physio regime as she works to come back to the sport.
She says it is difficult not to get angry over the crash in January, when a driver overtaking another cyclist on the opposite side of the road hit her head-on.
“I wish I had a credit card from the driver, and I could be tapping his card instead,” she said of others having helped her financial to overcome her set-back. She wonders how the 18-year-old driver who hit her now feels about the incident.
“He was only a learner, he should not
have even been on the road. It doesn’t serve me in any way to get negative
about him. But I just wonder how he’s dealing with it because I’m the one who
has their career under threat”.
Despite this anger, she will continue to
look on the bright side despite the very serious nature of the incident. As
soon as it happened, she knew how lucky she was to come out alive.
“Looking at the car, there is no way you would look at it and think ‘a girl walked out of that without any life-threatening injuries’. Like, it is absolutely smashed up,” she said. “The bonnet and windscreen are absolutely destroyed, and I walked away from that with just a broken knee and broken wrist.
“If I even hear someone saying that my knee will not be perfect again then I just do not want to talk to them. Why would I? What is the point in thinking like that?”
