Kenya, land of the Great Rift Valley, is where South African cyclist Brandon Downes raced to individual time trial (ITT) gold at the African Continental Championships.
It was a highly successful East African raid by Downes and his girlfriend, Lucy Young, as she defended her ITT title from a year ago in the same nation.
But if you’d told Downes this time two years ago that he’d be king of Africa, he’d have thought you were the laughing stock of local cycling.
For it was two years ago last week that Downes was dealing with a rift of another kind, a gaping gash in his upper leg after a serious crash while out training.
“I’d just come out of hospital where they were running a few tests,” he recalls. “I had been given the go-ahead to do some light training when, on the very next day, about 5km from home on a downhill section, a car pulled out directly in front of me.
“I swerved to try and avoid it, but my left knee smashed into the headlight, and the impact severed 80%-90% of my left quad muscle.”
The next step was back to not only the same hospital, but the very same ward as he’d been in a day before … with nurses seeing the humorous side of things.
“I went into theatre, and they stitched the muscles together, and I was in a leg brace and couldn’t bend the knee for three weeks.”
His rehabilitation started just after Christmas 2023, and it was tough going. “They tried to get the muscle to start activating to do some strengthening work, but there was no response, and we had to use electrodes to kickstart it into action.”
He started more intensive rehab in early January 2024, and he put in the hard yards daily for a month.
That hard work paid off in golden fashion. “About seven weeks after the accident, and after being on the bike for about two weeks, I rode the TT at the Gauteng provincial champs, a short race of about 30km-35km, and somehow ended up winning it.
“There followed a further three months of physio to get the muscle back into reasonable shape, and to be fair, the rehab continues to this day.”
And highly successfully too. Currently in Cape Town for preseason work with his new team, Tshenolo Pro Cycling Team, he says that strength tests show his left leg is now actually more powerful than his right.
Now 34, Downes was a latecomer on the cycling scene. Hockey was his sport of choice at Jeppe High and Wits University as he studied his way to a master’s degree in architecture.
It all started during a year of internship at Co-Arc International Architects in Joburg, where the company was participating in the popular 947 Ride Joburg race.
“I jumped on a bike a week before the race and bought my cleats at the expo the day before!”
He went on to finish that race in 3hr 38min with about 50km of training in total, but the cycling bug had definitely bitten.
“I dabbled around in a few races, always wanting to go faster, and started to train more…. I went to Europe where I got a few good results and even won a race in France … and people started to notice.”
In 2018, five years after his first 947 Ride Joburg, Downes clipped an hour and 23min off his debut time and was crowned race champion as he rode solo for the last 30km.
On his golden ride in Kenya, Downes says, “It was supposed to be in [Democratic Republic of] Congo in August and then popped up in November, but my shape was good and the circuit was very flat, and I went there with the belief that I could win it.
“I already thought the 28km course for elite men was quite short and would have liked it to actually be one lap longer (42km) and then they actually reduced the distance the night before; they made it even shorter to 14km.
“The last section of the race was into a headwind, which I used to my advantage, gaining time on my competitors, which ultimately determined the final result.”
Of course it didn’t help that his Garmin computer connected with his road bike while on the start ramp, which meant he had no power data, meaning Downes had to rely on instinct and gut feel, but it paid off handsomely.
His future for the next two years is with the Tshenolo Pro Cycling Team, and as he says, his architecture degrees are always there to fall back on. Until now, and in future, it seems he’s very much the architect of his own cycling success.
Last word to girlfriend, Lucy, double champion in her own right: “Thankfully in my own career through horse-riding and hockey and now cycling, I’ve never experienced a really bad injury.
“I was at the accident scene, and to witness Brandon and his mindset and how he took the injury in his stride, not panicking, staying calm, despite a lot of blood loss and so on, was amazing.
“His true triumph is the optimism he showed while injured — of course he wasn’t happy all the time during his injury, but he just did everything that was possible, day by day, to fully recover.
“Just seeing that side of him was amazing. If one day I get a nasty injury, I know I’ll use his recovery and strength of will as an inspiration.”
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