{"id":417702,"date":"2026-02-10T08:47:15","date_gmt":"2026-02-10T08:47:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/417702\/"},"modified":"2026-02-10T08:47:15","modified_gmt":"2026-02-10T08:47:15","slug":"derby-student-who-ended-up-in-coma-aspires-for-team-gb-track-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/417702\/","title":{"rendered":"Derby student who ended up in coma aspires for Team GB track team"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Lewis Fletcher has no recollection of his accident that left him in a coma just 17 months ago.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">An aspiring BMX racer, he was training in Gravesend, Kent, when his bike&#8217;s forks snapped, sending him head\u2011first into the concrete in September 2024.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Lewis, now 18 and a student at the University of Derby, suffered a seizure, four bleeds on the brain, spent three days in a coma and two weeks in intensive care.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">His cycling career looked over, but his long way back began when he came round. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">After coming through bouts of depression and learning to properly talk again, he suffered from cognitive fatigue. After speaking to friends for an hour, he said he would be so exhausted he would fall asleep for hours on end.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">But despite his traumatic injury, Lewis is now back on the bike. He has swapped the BMX ramp for the velodrome and hopes to break into the Team GB set up.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;It was a long recovery, when I got back to school it was still hard. I struggled with speech, which I still do sometimes,&#8221; he told the BBC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lewis Fletcher has no recollection of his accident that left him in a coma just 17 months ago.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417703,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-417702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417702\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}