Evie Richards was in second place when the crash happened. She was racing in Araxa, Brazil, in 2024, just three months away from the Paris Olympic Games, and she was trying to make up some time on the leader.
“I’d gone so fast into the jump,” she says. “I completely overshot the landing and landed into the take-off of the next jump and just remember crumpling and landing on my head.”
But there was a race at stake and so the mountain biker from Malvern, Worcestershire, got up as quickly as she went down, climbed back on and finished the race.
“Afterwards, people were like ‘are you OK?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.’ ” she says. “I went to find my team-mate and took her on a cool-down spin and when we rode through the paddock there were more people that said, ‘You don’t seem quite with it.’ ”
But still the Trek Factory Racing rider refused to accept there was anything wrong. First the adrenaline of racing had yet to subside but also accepting the truth may have meant an end to her season and her ultimate goal of competing for an Olympic medal.
“Those were our selection races for the Olympics,” she says, “and it was a really big year for me. I told Mum and Dad that I wasn’t feeling well but I didn’t tell anyone else because maybe I just didn’t want to show any weakness. I trained a lot to go into those races and I wasn’t going to let a fall stop that.”
After three weeks of feeling tired and struggling to balance on her bike or even sit at dinner with her family, Richards accepted that she wasn’t just jetlagged but had concussion. “It was pretty stupid,” she says. “When I look back now, I’m frustrated at myself.”
Richards returned to Araxa to win the World Cup event, a year after her horrific crash there
FABIO PIVA/RED BULL
She finally got the help she needed. She rested, she stopped riding, and with the help of her psychologist, Rich Hampson, and a Team GB physio she was put on the path to recovery. Richards could not take her eye off Paris 2024, but her team said she definitely wouldn’t be there if she didn’t recover first.
“I found it really hard,” Richards says. “I think I’m such a happy person and it felt like it just took everything from me. There was nothing I could do that would bring me joy or anything. I couldn’t ride, I couldn’t exercise, the only thing I could do was sleep and lie on an acupuncture mat and it was a really hard place.”
During this period, Richards was very open on Instagram to her 248,000 followers about the struggles she faced both mentally and physically and showing that a successful athlete can also be vulnerable.
“I think that’s the benefit of Instagram,” Richards says. “It’s so important to show the bad times because otherwise you’re just posting all the perfect beautiful times and it’s just so unrealistic. Those Instagram accounts that are unrealistic I find hard to follow because life isn’t like that, it’s not all perfect — so I think it’s really important to share.”
Richards was inspired to devote her life to cycling by one day being able to compete at the Olympics
ALAMY
After weeks of recovery and rest and following the guidance of her coaches, Richards started to become her former self.
“We made a plan and it was really weird like it all suddenly came together,” she says. “I think I got my period and then the next day I felt good again. I’d lost my period from the concussion, which was really strange, and then I got it back and it felt like a switch of the light. I felt like I’d suddenly come round.”
She was finally able to think about being selected for the cross-country mountain biking event at the Olympics. She started training and racing again, and in July of that year she lined up at the start at Colline d’Élancourt, southwest of the French capital. “When I got to Paris I can’t describe it,” Richards says. “It had taken me so much to get to this start line that it felt even more special.
“I was with my parents and I felt like the happiest person ever. I think a lot of people around me probably felt so nervous but I’m here, I’ve made it despite everything, and this just feels amazing.”
She would finish fifth in the event won by France’s Pauline Ferrand-Prévot but to even compete at Paris 2024 was an achievement after crashing in April.
The 28-year-old returned to Brazil this year and won the event in Araxa — the scene of her crash — to become the most successful female short track cross-country rider of all time, ahead of Ferrand-Prévot, before taking the World Cup overall title this month with a hard-fought second place in Mont-Sainte-Anne, Canada.
Richards, pictured in Les Gets in France this year, took the World Cup overall title this month and is now the most successful female short track cross-country rider of all time
BILLY CEUSTERS/GETTY IMAGES
As well as winning the short track World Cup, the Red Bull athlete has been cross-country and short track world champion and under-23 cyclo-cross world champion, making her one of Britain’s most successful off-road riders. But she’s far from finished.
“It was because I wanted to go to the Olympics that I got into cycling,” Richards says, “so to win a medal at the LA Olympics is the huge goal. But also there are rumours of cyclo-cross being in the Winter Olympics [in France, 2030] and I’ve definitely unfinished business in cross. I’ve raced a lot as an under-23 and won world championships but I haven’t been back as an elite.”
But there is one other big, and perhaps more surprising, goal for Richards: to ride the Tour de France Femmes in 2027 when the race starts in the UK.
“I don’t want to be someone who just spreads themselves thinly and does everything a bit average,” Richards says. “I can’t be like Tom Pidcock and blitz a bit of everything because he’s like a freak of nature and he’s incredible. I’m not quite that good. [But] there’s not many mountain bike races in the UK and I would really love to just race in my country, and if the Tour is coming through Wales, for me that’s too big an opportunity to turn down.
“It is something I’ve already told the team, ‘You need to let me know what I need to do to qualify for the Tour because I really want to be on that start line.’ I would love to race the Tour but not because I love road racing but because I’m British, and I love being British, and I would love to try to inspire kids by doing that race.”