Cycling and falls with injuries to the body and brain

“I know nothing can happen to us because we are immortal, immortal.” Die Toten Hosen sing it. Immortal? It’s asking a bit much. But that nothing will happen to us, that we are safe in what we do – this basic trust, this deceptive but so important feeling ensures weightlessness, for a matter of course in what we do.

Also in sports: professional cyclists ride down the mountain in complete confidence at 110 km/h, a tiny helmet on their heads, a few grams of plastic on their body and two disc brakes on their bikes. Actually a sporting exercise on the verge of insanity, but for the immortals a highly incidental exercise on their wheels.

What does the psychologist say about this? A healthy self-esteem is not pathological, he says, on the contrary. Studies have shown that people can deal with challenges more courageously with a certain amount of self-aggrandizement. What the psychiatrist Claas-Hinrich Lammers said a few weeks ago to the FAZ he related to business junkies like Elon Musk. It also applies to bike junkies. Self-confidence is what makes some great achievements possible in the first place. But what if, from one moment to the next, this feeling is shattered, once and for all?

Now that the season for professional cyclists has begun and is reaching its first peak this Sunday with the start of Paris-Nice, it is worth remembering briefly about Egan Bernal, the young Colombian who won the Tour de France with incredible ease in 2019. After that, things didn’t go well for him at first, but this year he should have been on the bill again at the Tour of France.

Twenty broken bones at Bernal

But then, in training, he crashed into a stationary bus at 65 km/h on a freeway in his home country. Who on earth rides a racing bike on the Autobahn? In Colombia it’s common among professional cyclists, we hear. There are many invulnerables there. But things didn’t go well for Bernal. He reported about twenty broken bones from the hospital: eleven ribs, femur, kneecap, two vertebrae, parts of the second cervical vertebra, metacarpals, one thumb.

Bernal is better now. If possible, he wants to race again, at some point. Maybe he can. But he will never be who he was again. This has nothing to do with the bones, but with the brain. Because once basic trust is lost, weightlessness is gone too, and the dangers that previously played no role grow to their true size in your head.

And so Bernal will be no different than Christopher Froome, who won the Tour four times before suffering a horrific crash in 2019 and on his comeback is a rider with no chance of major titles – one who has learned that anything can happen to him at any time . That he too is vulnerable and everything else is an illusion.