Marcus Christie was an international as a teenager, and after two years injured is now determined to get back into the sport at the top end
By Brian Canty
Marcus Christie could be forgiven for taking up a more lucrative and less stressful sport than cycling. He’s been away from the bunch for so long now that many assumed he had done just that. But reports he had been led astray by wine, women and song – like many a 20-something – appear to have been greatly exaggerated.
“Some of the stories that were going around about me were just plain wrong” he says.
“There was this idea that I was out partying and had just cracked from cycling but I’d say in the two years I’ve been injured I was out with my friends about four times.”
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“Cycling will never crack me. I love it too much for that to happen and I’ve been doing everything I can to try and get back from injury for this season,” he continues.
Though it's still unclear what exactly triggered a potentially careering ending Achilles injury in 2010, the 22-year-old Derry student hasn't stopped trying to figure it out and recalls the time when it first surfaced.
“I was in the UCI in Switzerland and doing a lot of track riding with the high performance squad and I started going on the road a bit more towards the end of that season. I noticed a lot of the guys I was racing against were very skinny and I wanted to be more like them so I went on crash diets and lost a lot of weight. I once lost 13 kilos in eight weeks because I was modelling my diet on what the best climber ate and he ate practically nothing. I was young and naive and I can’t say if that caused my Achilles problem but it stemmed from there,” he explains.
“It wasn’t until after a few races that I realised something was up and I started developing pains behind my knee; my body was just going haywire. I had to go back home to try and get sorted. Then the Achilles went, I reckon it went because I wasn’t recovered enough and when I started training I wasn’t strong enough, I think. No words can describe the Achilles injury.”
“It wasn’t an injury you get every day, and no one here in Ireland knew about it. I went to Dublin twice a week and Belfast twice a week to see doctors to try and get it sorted but it just got to the point where I couldn’t take it anymore because it wasn’t getting better so I eventually came across a specialist surgeon in Sweden.”
“He comes over to London to do a clinic so I booked an appointment to see him and he told me I’d need an operation. At that stage I was desperate because I’d been spending two years driving four times a week to get physio and rehab. I kept in shape through swimming and cross training, always with the intention of getting back. I never stopped thinking about getting back cycling. I said ‘if I keep doing this, it won’t be as hard getting back into it’. Most people thought I just stopped cycling and went partying but that wasn’t the case.”
Together with his coach Tommy Evans, he flew to London for the appointment and then to Sweden for the operation.
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“It was such a depressing time,” says Christie.
“Only for Tommy I might have stopped. And to Chris McNicholl and all the staff in Sports Institute Northern Ireland as well as Deirdre Burrell; I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. They always encouraged me to stay strong and assured me it would be alright. But there were times when I couldn’t get up or down the stairs. I thought I’d have to be paying for pain relief tablets for the rest of my life, never mind cycling competitively again.”
But within three months of the operation last year, Evans had successfully helped him back to fitness. And after 13 weeks he was back to clocking 20-minute 10 mile time trials.
Christie was a runner up to Charlie Prendergast in the 2009 junior national championships, and such was his talent he was promoted to the high performance squad where he rode alongside the likes of Matt Brammeier, Martyn Irvine and Davy O’Loughlin.
He was on the U23 national road squad and everything was looking rosy. But he recalls the time after his dramatic weight loss when some people didn't even recognise him.
“I remember a time after I’d lost all the weight where the lads saw me, having not seen me for a while, and they didn’t recognise me. I won’t be going on crash diets again, I can tell you,” he deadpans.
He was making a good recovery but that was checked when he crashed on a descent in Girona last November while training with Ronan McLaughlin and Philip Deignan. It wasn’t the most painful injury he says, but it’s still giving him slight discomfort.
“That was just a disaster,” he says of the crash.
“It happened in early November and I’ve been making some good progress since then; slow but steady. And again, it’s all thanks to Tommy. It’s not yet 100 per cent but it’s getting there.”
“I’m conscious that I won’t be able to just jump back into road racing. I need to learn that craft to race again so I’ll have to be patient. But in TTs I think I can get some results there. Hopefully, I can get fit enough to do the Rás and stay injury free, more importantly.”
“You need to learn the craft though and that’s something Tommy can teach me. I must try and absorb everything while I race. I’m confident I can get back to where I was. I’m really motivated now because it’s my last year U23 and if I’m to go anywhere in the sport, it has to be this year.”
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