'Cutthroat competition? Tell me about it...'

Back on the podium just three months on from a crash almost too horrific to fully describe, Jesse Ewart’s may be the greatest comeback story you have never heard

- Chris Marshall-Bell

“A few millimetres the other way,” says Jesse Ewart, pointing to a long, pink scar on his neck, “and it could have been a lot worse.” We are standing in the shade of a palm tree at February’s Tour of Oman, and while chatting idly about the week of racing ahead he has casually mentioned an accident he had last year. It’s the first I’ve heard of it – and I can’t help but press for more details.

The 28-year-old explains that the accident happened on 1 July 2022, in Romania, on what should have been his last training ride before the Sibiu Tour. He tells me what he knows about the crash, which is just the basic facts. “A car doing 80kph in a 30kph zone hit me head-on. I honestly can’t remember anything.” Ewart slammed into the car’s windscreen; the impact knocked him unconscious and the smashed glass sliced through his face and neck. “Team-mates have told me I was losing a lot of blood,” he continues. “The glass really cut me up, and one shard just missed the main artery.”

His chin was slashed, his lip torn apart, seven of his teeth were knocked out, with further deep cuts across his torso – and then there were the more serious injuries: “I cracked my skull from ear to ear, broke my nose,” Ewart lists the mangled bone and flesh. “I also fractured five vertebrae. I was coming in and out of consciousness and was punch drunk.”