The speed bump came out of nowhere. Barrelling at 60kph towards the one-kilometre-to-go banner on stage two of the Tour de Suisse, Urška Žigart was feeling confident. She darted out of a chase group, kicked ahead, and began closing the gap to a tearaway rider. The next moment, her body hit the ground like a rag doll.
“I have an image in my head where my bike is flying to one side and I’m flying to the other,” she tells Cycling Weekly. “But the next things are very blurry.”
The diagnosis could have been so much worse. Unconscious along the finishing straight, Žigart was rushed to hospital in Locarno, where the doctors diagnosed her with a broken jaw.
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Just six weeks on, however, she’s racing at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, crowning a remarkable six-week recovery. “Remarkable?” she smiles, and tries to play it down. “I don’t know about that.” She then takes us back to the beginning.
“The last thing I remember [from before the crash] is, because the men raced after us, Tadej [Pogačar, my partner] and his UAE team bus was going to the parking on the left side of the road, so I moved to the left side of the group and I was waving to the bus.
“I remember the last person I saw was their soigneur waving back at me. I saw there was one girl in front, and I was thinking, ‘Ok, we’re not supposed to be pulling or attacking or whatever, but just let me close this gap and we can roll to the finish.’”
Then came the speed bump, which jolted Žigart through the air.
The 29-year-old’s sports director, Jolien D’Hoore, was at the scene within minutes. “I’ve never seen something like this in my life,” she says. “She was unconscious for a few minutes. As soon as I saw that, I started running back to the team car, and then the other DS came to Urška. It was really scary – something I will never forget.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Due to the simple nature of the fracture, Žigart was fortunate to not require surgery. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t in pain, though. “They gave me quite a lot of medication to keep me from moving,” the Slovenian says. “I was trying to show them I was in pain by sticking my fingers inside my mouth.
“But I have to say that, after that, I bounced back really quickly. Of course, we did a lot of concussion tests, we started slowly, but I had no symptoms, other than a small fracture at the mandibular joint.”
In the days after the crash, Žigart flew to Belgium to see a doctor, who checked her jaw was correctly aligned. Everything seemed stable, so she was given the green light to begin training again, at first on the turbo trainer at home. “Then I started pushing the doctor to let me go outside slowly, and it was up from there,” she says.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Eleven days passed before Žigart’s wheels touched the tarmac again. She began with an easy ride – “it was all very touch and go; I wasn’t sure how a speed bump or a little hole in the road was going to move my jaw” – but everything went smoothly. All of a sudden, racing the Tour de France looked like a possibility again.
At the start of July, Žigart flew to Tignes to join her team-mates at their pre-Tour altitude camp. The team chefs chopped up her food so she didn’t have to chew it very much. Out on the road, not only was she able to keep up, but with the determination to restore her fitness before the Grand Départ in Switzerland, she ended up finding some of her best form.
“Her shape is incredible,” says D’Hoore. “She’s really at full capacity. I would say she’s even better than in Suisse. Also her morale and everything, she’s really good. She’s here in a support role for Kim [Le Court-Pienaar], and she enjoys it so much. There’s no pressure on her. She will be there on the climbs, and that’s what she likes the most.
“In the end, I think she was very lucky. I think she had a guardian angel with her.”
Žigart agrees. On the eve of the race, she shared a long Instagram post saying she had “an angel looking out for me from above”. She’s now back on solid foods, pain free, and enjoying the carnival of the Tour – her third Grand Tour of the season.
“Now it’s six weeks, they say it’s as stable as it’s going to get, so it’s safe to race,” she says. “The body is an amazing thing.”
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