“Two weeks after the accident, I took the cast off for the first time to shower, looked down at my knee and fainted,” Tom Gloag pauses to let out an embarrassed laugh. “I’d never fainted before, but it was the sight of how much muscle I’d lost. I was out for about a minute.” In August 2023, Gloag’s right kneecap had shattered into dozens of tiny fragments when he collided with a car during training. It was only once his knee had been surgically rebuilt that the rehab challenge really hit him. “I thought the main issue was going to be regaining the range of motion, but actually it was rebuilding strength,” he tells me by phone from his home in Girona. “The muscle had atrophied so badly that even months later, when getting up in the night, I’d have to grab my leg to bend it – my right quad was that weak.”
Before the accident, the Visma-Lease a Bike rider had been riding high, having begun 2023, his neo-pro season, by almost winning a mountain stage of the Volta a Valenciana. He followed this up in May by helping Primož Roglič win the Giro d’Italia. Having been drafted in at the 11th hour, his maiden Grand Tour left the Londoner, then 21, feeling wipedout. “I was in a massive box,” he recalls. “I’d never been so tired in all my life, and I struggled to recover from the load. The level of fatigue was a massive shock to the system.” He was given an extended break from racing and did not return until the Clásica San Sebastián at the end of July. Three weeks later, on 17 August, the collision with a car in Girona ended his season in an instant – and threatened his career.
