Wattbike helping Simon Richardson on the road to recovery (#simonstrong)
Posted by Matt Moran on Sep 28, 2011
We’re often asked about providing support or sponsorship for various cyclists, triathletes, events and charities and while we take a detailed look at every request there are some occasions when it takes a matter of seconds for us to say yes, we can help.
We’d been following Simon Richardson on Twitter for some time, he’s an inspiring guy. In 2001 he was riding his bike to training when he was hit by a car which left him with a damaged back in 2 places and a broken right leg. In 2005 he took up cycling as part of his rehabilitation, going on to win 2 Gold and 1 Silver medal at the Beijing Paralympics just 3 years later. In the 2009 Honours List, Simon was appointed a well-deserved MBE.
Preparations for the London 2012 Paralympics were going well when Simon was involved in a collision whilst out training on his bike in August 2011, it left him in a critical condition in hospital. The news quickly spread via Twitter and an incredible amount of messages of support were coming in from all over the world. We left our own message too. We’d never met Simon, we just enjoyed keeping up to date with what he was up to via Twitter.
It was great to see after a few days that his condition was improving from what was a life-threatening situation and the updates from Phil Jones of Race-Pace.net kept the cycling community up to speed in the following weeks as Simon started to realise that he’d been involved in a big accident, but also that he was in a position to begin the road to recovery. And then we saw this message on Twitter:
It took us no longer than the 5 seconds it took to read the message to know that we wanted to help Simon on his journey to getting back to what he likes doing best. We’re not sure when Simon will want to start using a Wattbike but we’ve got one waiting here at HQ, ready for the call when he says that he wants to step back on a bike again. It might be indoors, but those first few pedal revolutions will no doubt be the start of another chapter in the extra-ordinary life of Simon Richardson MBE.
We look forward to hearing Simon’s thoughts on his recovery on the Wattbike blog in the coming weeks and months. We know the rest of the Wattbike community wish him all the best too.