“There are 3 guys in front of me. First guy swerves around a big hole but doesn’t 
point it out. The second guy didn’t see it — he didn’t know it was coming. He goes in the hole and crashes hard. Third guy goes in the hole and crashes. I hit the rider in front of me, went straight over the bars and landed directly on top of my head. I’m sitting there and there are people continuing to crash behind me.” There is blood, broken frames, and broken bones — a hellish scene unfolds, the severity amplified by the remote location. There are no team cars following, no race doctor, no immediate support. The 20 kilometres to reach help was just the prologue to a much longer journey that now lay ahead.

This is a stark reality of gravel racing — there is little protection. Nobody there to assess the rider trail-side, look at the damaged helmet, and pull them from the race. A quick self-assessment locates blood flowing from a puncture wound in his back, presumably from a stick.

Andy felt immediately stiff in the neck but nothing seemed broken. Still, there was an underlying sense that was troubling but impossible to decipher in that moment, amidst the unfolding drama. Easier to attribute any weird sensations to the shock of such a brutal impact than attempt to self-diagnose from the side of a field — and other riders needed help. Crashing when the intensity was high, and his body was already on the rivet, meant that his injuries would be masked by the anaesthetic nature of effort and adrenaline.

Patched up by the medics at the finish, Andy removed his helmet for the first time. “Looking at the plastic shell, you could definitely tell that it’s dented and scratched, but not that bad. And then I look on the inside and the foam is in four separate pieces. If the plastic shell wasn’t there it would have just disintegrated.”

It's common for concussion symptoms to delay presentation. Perhaps the initial surge of adrenaline or the immediate, more obvious, pain divert attention, but the following day Andy’s brain began to show signs of shock. Extreme fatigue hampered the journey home but even at this point, having been sent home by the race medics, it was unclear if the way he felt was just part of normal race recovery. It wasn’t until 48 hours after the crash that his condition really escalated. “I woke up the next morning, after returning to Girona, with the most blinding headache. I stood up and fell straight back into bed — I didn’t even have the coordination to stand up properly. And for the next three weeks my apartment was like an asylum.”

Andy is quite matter-of-fact about how this period played out, but it’s impossible not to consider the vulnerable state — and danger — that he now found himself in. His friends were all out of town racing and his family were on the other side of the world. He was dealing with this situation alone. “It hurt to think, it hurt to have the lights on, it hurt to look at my phone, and I was pretty much incapable of doing anything. I had to get myself to the grocery store to buy food and the first time I went out was just so overwhelming and exhausting that I had to sit down on the floor of the grocery store with a raging headache.”

A head injury assessment (HIA) is weakened without knowing the baseline capability of the individual. At the race, although their assessment of his condition was scant, there was no way for the medics to know if how Andy was presenting after the crash was within a normal range for him. Even though the strongest symptoms were yet to start, it might have helped to provide earlier diagnosis.

A follow-up appointment with a head injury specialist in Girona revealed the severity of the concussion. Immediately he failed the eye-tracking and vision tests. “That ended up being my longest lasting symptom of the concussion — feeling like I was cross-eyed and seeing double. I couldn’t read a street sign. Or if I was walking, looking at my feet and lifted my head quickly, I had no idea what I was seeing. It made me feel nauseous and totally unaware of my surroundings.” Advice was to keep trying to achieve simple tasks, but just walking around the block was overstimulating and overwhelming. Just a passing car in Andy’s peripheral vision brought on intense waves of nausea.

The model of a privateer is a house of cards built on shifting sands. Foundations are insecure and shallow. The athlete is everything — marketer, accountant, social media manager, head of logistics, and nutritionist. As time went on, and races came and went without him on the start line, Andy entered a new phase — one of pressure. He wasn’t competing, so wasn’t earning. He couldn’t fulfil sponsor agreements to produce content. With no support network and a diminishing race calendar, he was told to leave Europe. But it’s not that easy to override the drive and competitive mindset of someone who is breaking through in their sport. Someone who, before the crash, was setting power PRs on almost every training ride. All the data and all the sensations were trending in the right direction. “I was kind of battling that personally. I wanted to get into races and had put a lot of weight into wanting to do well at a lot of these, having built up my whole winter and spring to be peaking at a certain time. It’s super-tough. I felt like I would be letting myself down if I went home.”

As time dragged on, the question arose — did this hole in the trail represent a pause in his career or a full-stop? “I think that was the toughest part of it all — the mental space that it ended up putting me in. Especially being a privateer, it’s not like I know I have a 2-year contract to lean on. I’m not a number one athlete in the world in the eyes of sponsors, right now. I’m still figuring out how good I can be and haven’t found where my ceiling is yet. I need to prove that I can do this so that I can set myself up for a successful future.”

Andy is deeply aware of how fragile the privateer system is. On top of doing his training and racing, he has to think creatively about how he can add value for sponsors. Being sidelined with an injury — one with no clear timeframe for recovery — removes a lot of the subject matter that would normally be available for content creation. “Even if I talk about my story of getting a concussion, I didn’t want to feel like the person who was milking an injury. I didn’t want to be on social media just talking about how bad my crash was. And even though that was all I had, just sitting down and writing about it was so hard to do. For three weeks straight my biggest achievement was making breakfast — literally just getting out of bed and cracking 
an egg in a pan. I couldn’t write about that.”

As the injury lingered and recovery felt like it plateaued, Andy sought psychological support. “My idea of working with a Sports Psych was to get you faster — more of a mental performance thing, rather than it is a wellness thing. But the people around me suggested that I talk to someone. Someone who could equip me better with a mental toolkit to help deal with the pressure. And especially when you’re in a concussed state, because you’re an emotional train wreck.”

Andy acknowledges that he challenged advice more than perhaps he should have. Wanting to prove, through stubborn competitive nature, that he could be the anomaly who recovers quickly from something like this and gets immediately back to the same level. But that mindset belies the fear — the denial — of not wanting to consider that things might be different. “I don’t want to end my career as a 22-year-old because I had a crash. I don’t want to be the guy who missed all the opportunities.” It’s an age that can be make or break. The endpoint of when a rider is still considered young and worthy of being offered a chance. “I feel the pressure of that a lot. Yeah, I’m 22 and I’m good. But a lot of the guys being signed are 18 to 22 years old, and if you get signed after that it’s because you did something remarkable. But it’s so much harder to do something remarkable when you don’t have that support.” The catch of the privateer model, again.

Patience is everything. But it’s also the hardest quality to allow into the process. Athletes are hungry to achieve — to validate the sacrifices of training by performing in races. But those self-demands don’t align with what’s reasonable to expect from the body after a traumatic episode and time stood still. “Every workout felt like a failed workout. And I asked myself – ‘Am I capable of doing this training anymore? Am I capable of hitting the numbers anymore?’ I couldn’t get myself to see the light at the end of the tunnel for a while, which is probably a bit of a maturity thing, but also a need to develop patience as a skill.”

The whole situation has given Andy the opportunity to reflect on how he functions as a privateer, and how the experience could provide insight to others in his position. Things like allocating budget to look after himself better, that can be hard to justify over the experience of going to a race. He is the equipment and, just like a bike, if you don’t do proper maintenance eventually performances faulters. He has a new appreciation for the unseen — intangible — things that still ultimately benefit his training and racing. Months after the crash, his form is returning. “It’s not like a road racing calendar where I can go out several times every week and prove myself. You can’t do that with gravel racing — the distances and the terrain are too much for the body. So each race means more.”

It’s a case of dialing in and being specific with targets. You pick your fights and go hard for a smaller racing calendar. And the next fight on the comeback trail? Steamboat Gravel.