One last chance

After a decade of operations, rehab and setbacks following a devastating hit-and-run crash, Paralympian Simon Richardson is finally back on his bike

- Phil Barke

When the editor Simon Richardson called to tell me that Simon Richardson was making another comeback, I have to admit I was slightly baffled. It wasn’t the names – I realised that CW’s Simon was talking about the MBE-sufficed Welsh Paralympian – but I found it hard to credit that a man who has been through so much was pondering a return to racing.

It is hard to know where to start in telling 54-year-old Richardson’s story, so here is a potted history. In 2001, he was hit by a car while training, breaking his leg and his back, leaving him with permanent weakness on his left side. Having been classified as disabled, he went to the 2008 Beijing Paralympics and won gold in the LC3 kilo and 3km, setting world records in both. In 2011, he was hit by a drunk driver and left for dead with multiple injuries including fractures to the spine and a broken pelvis – he has not raced since. In 2017 he had a minor stroke, and in 2019 the metal rods holding together his spine snapped, leaving him in agony. And now, after all that, he is making a comeback.

“A few months after the accident [in 2011] they took the body brace off and my spine collapsed,” Richardson tells me via video call from his home in Llantwit Major, south Wales. “Then it was nine years of operations, on and off.” He returned to riding in 2018 but persistent pain in his torso led to the discovery that the titanium rods in his back had broken and were pressing on his internal organs. “I was on high doses of morphine but it wasn’t doing anything,” he says plainly as if suffering long since lost the capacity to surprise him.