Chad Haga has indicated that his cycling career is over after a heavy crash on his mountain bike left him with multiple injuries.
The 38-year-old US rider has carved out a successful secondary career in gravel since retiring from road cycling at the end of 2023, but recently revealed his plans to hang up his wheels at the end of this season.
That ending has now come prematurely, and without a fitting farewell, as Haga revealed in an emotional social media post on Thursday morning.
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“Heartbroken,” he wrote alongside a photo of himself in a hospital bed.
“This morning I gave a little mtb jump too much pop and ended my career early.”
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Haga then listed out the injuries he had sustained, which include damage to both forearms as well as two broken ribs, a collarbone injury, and a collapsed lung.
The radius and the ulna are the two bones that comprise the forearm, and while Haga does not specifically state as such, it is presumed that he suffered a fracture in the top of his left radius and a fracture to his right ulna.
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Haga also indicated that he suffered a head impact.
“I’m thankful that my helmet did its job and saved my brain,” he wrote, going on to thank the emergency medical technicians who treated him as well as his family and friends.
Haga spent a decade as a pro road racer and won a stage of the Giro d’Italia with the Sunweb team before following the wave of road pros heading into the burgeoning gravel scene in 2024. After a number of solo missions to ‘prove that I belong’, he bagged a ride with the PAS Racing set-up and went on to finish runner-up at that year’s Unbound 200, the biggest race in gravel.
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Towards the end of 2024, he suffered a very similar injury to this latest one, breaking the radius and ulna in his right arm in a training ride. At the end of a 2025 campaign in which he went full privateer as a gravel racer, he had surgery to remove a plate in that right forearm.
Haga has continued to race the world’s biggest off-road events with a strong line-up of personal sponsors in 2026, but at the start of August he revealed that he would not race on in 2027.
“It was on a sledding day in January of this year when I realised I didn’t want to keep making the sacrifices it takes to perform at the highest level, so this year I’m doing the best I can with the time that I have to train, and I’m going to wrap it up and move onto new adventures,” he said in a social media update.
“I’m excited about that. There are just a couple of months left so I’m going to make the most of my last few races.”
Haga raced the Leadville Trail MTB event earlier this month, but had not publicly stated which races remained and where he planned to compete for the final time. In any case, that ending has now been taken away.
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