who has been selected to represent Australia at the UCI Road World Championships in Rwanda next month<\/a>, initially put his symptoms down to allergies but scans later showed blood clots through his lungs that if left untreated could have proved life-threatening.<\/p>\n\u201cMy training and everything is so severe that those clots obviously left somewhere else and got to my lungs, and the lungs are the last step before it gets to your brain and kills you. I think it was quite lucky,\u201d Matthews tells AusCycling from his home in Monaco.<\/p>\n
The Jayco Alula rouleur, who is originally from Canberra, spent a couple of nights alone in a Switzerland hospital unsure if would be able to leave as blood tests and scans confirmed the diagnosis. A pulmonary embolism occurs when blood clots in the lungs block blood flow and restrict oxygen to the rest of the body. <\/p>\n
Matthews recalls experiencing symptoms including shortness of breath, chest pain and heartbeat irregularities at the June training camp in Livigno, Italy, which worsened as his sessions intensified. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe were there for in total three weeks, like normal, and about halfway in I started to feel like I just couldn\u2019t breathe,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt like I was trying to breathe underwater. I was trying to still do all my training, but I was thinking it was allergies that were holding me back.<\/p>\n
\u201cTowards the end of the camp, when I had to do my really, really hard efforts, I just couldn\u2019t get through the session. I got through one of the efforts and thought I was going to die,\u201d Matthews continues.<\/p>\n
\u201cLucky my coach was there, and he told me to stop, let\u2019s just rest and see if you can recover for tomorrow. That afternoon we went for a walk in the town just to clear my head a little bit and my heart rate was actually higher walking in the town than what it was on the bike.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, we jumped in the car and drove to Swiss and got some blood checks, and then they sent me straight for a CT scan and saw the scan of my lungs was full of blood clots.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u201cSo yeah, it was pretty scary. And then a couple of nights in a Swiss hospital by myself\u00a0because everyone else was gone – that was also pretty scary, not knowing exactly what was going\u00a0to happen to me, if I was going to be able to leave the hospital or if I was going to stay there, or die. I didn\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Bling](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Getty_TimdeWaele_Australia-TTT-World-Champion-2024)
<\/p>\n
Michael Matthews, pictured with national teammates in the mixed team relay at the 2024 UCI Road World Championships, has extra motivation for the 2025 titles in Rwanda. Photo: Getty <\/p>\n
Matthews was prescribed anti-coagulation, or blood-thinning, medication to treat the clots and had two weeks off the bike as he talked daily with medical experts. The medication worked quickly, and he started to ride for up to an hour each day, keen to exercise but also cautious of the increased dangers of crashing while being treated.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe team was really trying to hold me back as much as they could but they also said we don\u2019t really want you to train because if you do crash on the blood-thinners you can get bleeding on the brain and die, so it\u2019s really sort of up to you if you want to take risk going out training, which is obviously a little bit scary when you\u2019re going out training on the road where something can be out of your hands,\u201d Matthews says.<\/p>\n
The former green jersey champion was aggrieved to miss the Tour de France in July, but the prospect of representing Australia for the 14th consecutive time at the UCI Road World Championships has served as motivation to return to competition as fast as possible.<\/p>\n
Matthews, who won Eschborn-Frankfurt in May, returned to the peloton for the first time since his diagnosis last weekend, placing eighth at the Bretagne Classic-Quest-France in Plouay. He\u2019s set to compete in the US at the Maryland Classic this weekend before defending Australia\u2019s title in the mixed team relay at the World Championships and lining up in the elite men\u2019s road race.<\/p>\n
![\"Michael](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/bling.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Michael Matthews celebrates at Eschborn-Frankfurt. Photo: Sprint Cycling <\/p>\n
\u201cObviously for me the World Championships is always one of my biggest motivations of the year \u2013 putting on the green and gold jersey and representing Australia at the World Championships is always a beautiful way to end the season,\u201d Matthews says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think through my situation, what I\u2019ve been going through, it\u2019s been something that I\u2019ve always been thinking about in the back of my mind, when I go out training, when I get up in the morning whether I should go and ride my bike or not, or continue pushing to do all these tests to get myself back healthy faster than probably normal. So yeah, it was an extra motivation, which always boosts me to rise to another level for the World Championships.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love World Championships, I love being around all the Aussies and obviously representing Australia. But now with the whole season changing, with no Tour de France, with no Tour de Suisse, without all these races, it was definitely something that I could really pin my mind to and focus on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Matthews doesn\u2019t know what caused the blood clots but has taken assurance from the fact scans now show his lungs have cleared. And he\u2019s advising anyone who experiences chest pain to be seen by a medical professional.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been a long process, but everything seems to be on track, which is nice,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter a couple of weeks of taking the anti-coagulants, the clots were going away quite quickly. It\u00a0seems like cured\u00a0from all the checks we\u2019ve done. Originally when we first found out about the embolism, we checked my whole body, so we checked if it was coming from anywhere else, and it was nowhere else in my body, which is a good thing obviously.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe checked all through the three months of taking these blood-thinners now and it was just in my lungs, so\u00a0it\u2019s gone now completely from my lungs. My heart is like a 20-year-old, one of the doctors said last week when we went to check.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s a good lesson to me and to everyone, actually. If you are feeling a sharp pain in your chest don\u2019t just think it\u2019s allergies, or bad sleep, or fatigue. You definitely should go and get it checked.\u201d<\/p>\n
Main Image: Michael Matthews in the green and gold at the World Championships. Photo: Getty <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Decorated Australian cyclist Michael Matthews concedes he is lucky to be alive after undergoing treatment for a pulmonary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569],"tags":[64,63,784,85],"class_list":["post-114326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}