Those who saw Becky James’s astonishing series of medal-winning rides at the world track championships in February 2013 were left in no doubt as to her immense guts and determination. Now those qualities will be tested again as she faces a new challenge; the need to repair her body after a lengthy fight against a knee injury that brought her season to a premature end.
Having been forced out of the Commonwealth Games in June, the 23-year-old will spend the next three months off her bike treating her left knee at the English Institute of Sport rehabilitation centre at Bisham Abbey. She will not ride in the world championships in Paris in February. “The worlds are out,” she told the Observer. “My season is completely gone.”
On Friday, James had keyhole surgery on a chronic shoulder injury – lateral clavicle osteolysis – which has been traced back to an injury sustained in the gym when she was 16. But it is James’s left knee that has disrupted her training and racing since April. A long period of complete rest and rehabilitation is the only answer.
As James details six months spent attempting to ride through the pain, of having to be pushed home from training rides, of the constant attempts to intensify her training only to beaten, time and again, by the pain, you sense her relief that finally – with a fair wind – she has got to grips with the problem.
Last year contained immense highs: four medals at the world championships, a trip to Australia to watch her boyfriend, the rugby union international George North triumph with the Lions, but recently there have been a hellish few months, from the death of her grandmother in late February to a scare over the health of her severely handicapped sister, Bethan. She has had things to fall back on – North, the rest of her family, a newly acquired mini dachshund puppy, Lola, her beloved baking – but they have been sorely needed.
The picture of one trial piled on another is completed when she discusses an operation in mid-May to remove abnormal cells discovered during a routine cervical smear test. “I went in straight after the world’s [in February] and had a letter two and a half weeks later to say there was an abnormal smear – the nurse drew me a scale from normal to cancer and I was ‘severe’. I completely didn’t expect that. The cells were severely abnormal, it was four weeks until the operation, it was the most stressful four weeks, I was on Google researching it. It was the worst idea. I lost a lot of sleep over it over it. It has a 100% success rate but it’s normal to worry.”
With this major concern in the background, James attended a training camp in Majorca in April, where she put in miles on the road that she was not used to doing, and this was where the knee problem flared up for the first time. “I was in so much pain, I was almost delirious. I could pedal single legged but stopping and starting were excruciating. April and May were just two awful months.”
That began what became a pattern. She would train, get pain, take time off to recover, begin again convinced she had turned the corner and then be knocked back. “In Germany back in June before the Commonwealth Games I was trying to train so hard to get fit. I was so far from where I wanted to be. The knee flared up on a road ride, I got off the bike, I couldn’t walk properly, I was in so much pain. That was the week I realised the Games was not on the cards. I was devastated to pull out – I was so motivated after Delhi and the world’s, the Games was going to be a big step on the road to Rio.
“I had three injections on the knee, two steroid and one dextrose” – the dextrose is injected straight into the bursa to attempt to reduce swelling – “but when I got back on the track after the dextrose injection [in early September] the knee felt different, just not comfortable. I got up to two hours on the road, which was huge progress, I’d felt I’d turned a massive corner, we introduced gym work, and it went again, I had to be pushed home from a road ride. I was absolutely devastated, my head was all over the place.”
The turning point came when James was put in touch with a knee and hip specialist via a bike shop in Cardiff. “It’s a very unusual injury, three injuries in fact, but the underlying problem is at the top of the tibia, where the tendon joins the bone, the ITB [iliotibial band] is constantly flicking over it and causing the pain.
“He told me if I didn’t break the cycle I could cause permanent damage. I had kept pushing and pushing and pushing. I needed to hear it from someone. I needed to stop and get to the bottom of it then restart so I have to do the full period of rehab. I probably should have done this three months ago, but I’ve done everything right, we’ve tried everything and everyone has been baffled.”
The dilemma was obvious: whether stopping now means she will be fully recovered for the run-in to the 2016 Olympics. There lies the uncertainty. “It’s all about Rio. You can do it from a year out – if I can be in the right place in July next year, back on my bike, ready and qualified for the world cups next winter. It depends how long it will take me to get back. I can do it, I’m so determined,” she says, her voice shaking a little. “It has to be done.”
