One eye laughing, one eye crying — my first Worlds, finished on a bad knee.
The World Championships in Val di Sole were the last race of the season — and the last story in this journal. It was my second time in the valley; I'd been the year before, so I knew my way around, and this time the hotel was far better placed than last.
I knew going in that good content would be hard to make. UCI regulations mean you essentially can't show anything from the racing itself, so we had to build a workaround — ways to make it feel like the World Championships without a single race scene. I think we pulled it off: the numbers from this one were genuinely strong, and I loved being there. My first-ever Worlds.
Worlds is a different animal in another way, too — the teams aren't trade teams any more, they're the national federations. We had a commission to photograph the entire squad of the Bund Deutscher Radfahrer, the German cycling federation: my first official assignment at national level, and a lot of fun.
My kneecap popped out on the Thursday. I worked four more days on it.
I have to look back on Val di Sole with one eye laughing and one eye crying, though. On the Thursday, on the track walk, I rolled my ankle and my kneecap popped clean out. For days afterwards walking was agony — I could just about manage uphill, but downhill was almost impossible. I pushed through four more days of it to get the job done, seeing doctors between shifts, on prescribed painkillers and injections straight into the knee just to make it home.
The moment I got back, I went straight to hospital to have it checked — and now I'm off the bike for six weeks. Bittersweet is the only word for it. But a rainbow week, my first Worlds, and a season I'll never forget? I'd take all of it again.
