‘Sweet, that's sound!'

After losing his hearing 12 years ago, former champion rider Morgan Fox could not have imagined the miracle cure and return to pro cycling that awaited him

- David Bradford

“I woke up and thought, ‘Shit, I’ve overslept’ – I could see the alarm was flashing but there was no sound coming from it.” Former Irish national road race champion Morgan Fox is reliving the moment in late 2008 when a bike crash came back to haunt him. “I picked it up, played around with the volume, then suddenly realised it was me, not the alarm.” Overnight his world had fallen silent.

There had been no warning – “no symptoms, no headaches, no sniffles” – but immediately Fox suspected a link to the crash from which he was still in recovery. Four months earlier, racing at the Tour of Qinghai Lake in China: “I’d had a flat and was chasing back on, doing about 60kph. Just as I was getting to the back of the bunch, there was a huge crash in front of me.” He hit the brakes, narrowly avoided the melee and was thanking his lucky stars when: “just as I put a foot on the ground, he hit me like a missile.”

American Fred Rodriguez had punctured at the same time as Fox, and arrived at the pile-up seconds behind him – carrying too much speed to stop. The impact left Fox with multiple internal injuries including nine broken ribs, a punctured lung, and head trauma. After a month in hospital in China, much of it in intensive care, he was flown home to Ireland.

Fox, who is now 46, had turned pro in 2000, the first Irishman to do so since Sean Kelly’s retirement, and enjoyed a stint in Belgium before signing for the Murphy and Gunn (subsequently An Post) Sean Kelly team in 2005. By the time of his accident, he was in his mid-30s and had been pondering retirement: “But then Pezula Racing came along and, despite running two businesses by that stage, I kept going one year too long – the inevitable bad crash happened.”