![]() ![]() Amid the yelling bystanders and paramedics and the driver and all the noise and pain and confusion, a helicopter arrived and flew me to a hospital. I had a broken neck and couldn’t move my arms or legs. The rain started to fall and with it my life, my plans, my future, and my one true love started falling apart too. I landed on my head and immediately couldn’t feel my legs. ![]() The world went quiet and I flew off the front of the car. I entered an intersection, one of a thousand on the trip, and watched a car drive into the side of me. I was riding just ahead of Peter that September morning, listening to music and dancing on my bike. We were a day and a half out of Milan and already looking back at the mountains and the incredible memories we left up there. We even climbed the Zoncolan by accident one day just to get to the other side.Ī couple of days later, our all-too-short ride was coming to an end. We climbed passes I had long dreamt of and even harder passes I’d never heard of. ![]() We planned little and rode mostly highways, and I giggled for days as we rode from village to village, stumbling through language barriers and flying up climbs. My riding partner Peter and I packed our bags and flew to Austria, planning on riding from Vienna to Milan via the Dolomites. I’d made some money and like always was excited to spend it. My coach asked me to do two final hard weeks to set myself up for a big build into the winter after a long and exhausting summer of racing. Rather, I was readying to dive deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole. I was about to let go of the one thing that had dominated my livelihood and my identity for the past decade, but not that I had known it at the time. Words and photos by Evan Christenson ( years ago I was finishing my last ever full season of bike racing. ![]()
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