Conn McDunphy, the reigning elite men’s Irish TT champion, has been given the all clear by his neurosurgeon to return to racing almost four months after his bad crash.
McDunphy, who just turned
24-years-old last week, took a brilliant win at the Irish championships in
Limerick in October when he took the TT title from Nicolas Roche and Lindsay
Watson.
He then went on to ride very
strongly in the road race three days later before finishing in 8th place.
However, when he left Ireland to return to France, McDunphy had a very serious
crash.
He was racing for his French team CC Nogent-sur-Oise in the Arbent-Bourg-Arbent – a 166km Coupe de France N1 race – when he crashed hard with about 30km to go.
The impact of the crash was such that he was knocked out for a time on the roadside and was airlifted to hospital. He suffered a skull fracture, in the occipital bone at the bottom of the back of the skull.
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However, he quickly got on the road to recovery and wrote a piece for stickybottle late last year updating us on his progress.
McDunphy – and Irish international and formerly of Lucan CRC and the UK Raleigh and Holdsworth Continental teams – has now said he was given the all clear last Friday to race again.
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His neurosurgeon told him while he
must continued with rehab for his neck for a long time, he is able to start
racing again.
“After four months of uncertainty about whether I’d ever be able to race safely again, this is extremely welcome news,” he said.
McDunphy added while the bone in
his skull is still fractured, and may never fully heal, there was enough
fibrous fusion and tissue for the bone to be stable and he is as safe to race
now as he was before the crash.
He told stickybottle he has been
training at home – where he rode on the home trainer with his rigid neck brace
on for a long period – and was looking forward to racing in France, probably
before the end of the month.
While he had a number of offers
from other teams for 2021 he has opted to stay with his French team of last
year, CC Nogent-sur-Oise.
“I think Nogent is a really good
environment to prove myself and try to get back my top to the level again,” he
said.
“I'm going to start out in some
races in the south of France in two weeks time and then it all depends on Covid
after that.”
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