Billy Cookson likes to think of this week’s British Track Championships as the FA Cup. “You’ve got the best athletes in the world in their discipline, you’ve got world record holders, world champions and European champions… and then you’ve got me,” he smiles.
“I’m like that non-league team that gets a good, little run and gets to show off what they can do – Havant and Waterlooville, a good few years ago, that’s the one that always sticks in my memory.”
Cookson, a 30-year-old management accountant based in London, only began cycling three months ago. He bought the track bike he’s riding in Manchester six weeks ago from Facebook Marketplace, and he’s so new to riding the rollers, he has to hold onto a rail while he warms up and down.
“When I set out, I said I wanted to ride in the Nationals,” he says. “A few people laughed at me, and I said, ‘No, I’ll ride in the Nationals.’” It’s the same resolve he showed seven years ago when, after a life-changing car crash, he had to teach himself to use a knife and fork again.
“I broke both my ankles, tibia, fibia, patella, my femur snapped… I punctured both my lungs as well, and split my liver,” he says. “Sorry to be graphic, but my arm was hanging off, my knee and my bone was smashed out of my leg, and my head was nearly taken off – I’ve got a laceration that went from ear to ear,” he continues, lifting up his fringe to show the scar. “I had like a flap on the top of my head.”
Cookson doesn’t remember the air ambulance taking him to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. His only memory of the accident ends five minutes before it happened. The next thing he recalls is waking up from an induced coma six days later, with his parents at the end of the hospital bed.
“That’s when I realised it was quite bad,” he says. “Because I was in Australia, it was at least 24 hours for them to get there.”
(Image credit: Billy Cookson)
At the time, the doctors said Cookson had lost so much blood that he “didn’t have any of his own left in him”. He underwent 28 surgeries, and spent six months in a rehabilitation hospital, regaining his strength and learning how to walk again.
“It was two years before I could pick something up with my hand and let go of it,” he says. “I was great to go for a beer with, because I couldn’t get it to my mouth, and I couldn’t let go – if someone needed me to hold their beer, it wasn’t going in my mouth.”
Cookson chose to stay in Australia after the car crash, and only returned to the UK last March. “This winter, I was twiddling my thumbs – not very well, obviously,” he winks, “– and I thought, ‘What shall I do?’ I could go and sit in the pub and go and watch football most weekends, or I could actually go and do something. That’s when I thought of track cycling.”
A hobby cyclist when he was younger, Cookson used to take his dad’s old mountain bike for weekend rides, and remembered a few track sessions he did as a 15-year-old. He knew track cycling was a Paralympic sport, but how could he get into it? “I did my accreditation at Lee Valley over four consecutive weeks,” he says, “and I went up to Loughborough to do a Talent ID day [with British Cycling].”
Cookson rode the kilo time trial on Saturday night.
(Image credit: Olly Hassell/SWPix)
Due to his injuries – Cookson’s right arm has been rebuilt and is now shorter than his left – he received a C5 classification, meaning he competes in the racing category for those with the least severe impairments.
Before he’d even received his Talent ID power results, he told the coaches he wanted to race at the upcoming Nationals. “They said, ‘We’ll see. If you go every week, then maybe. But it’s quite a high bar.’” In their reticence, though, he saw an exciting challenge. “I asked for a kit list of the things I’d need,” he says.
“People were shocked that that was my first-ever bunch race [on Thursday], because of how I positioned myself and stuff,” he says of the scratch race, in which he finished 12th. On Friday, Cookson was disqualified from the elimination race for riding on the blue band – “I wasn’t familiar with [that rule],” he says. “It’s all learning. I’ll take that on board.”
He then went on to place 8th in the kilometre time trial on Saturday evening, clocking 1:17.248 – a speed of almost 47kph.
With so much experience gained in just three months, Cookson is now thinking to longer-term goals. It’s just over two years until the Paralympics in LA – is he aiming for that? “I think I have to,” Cookson says, “because that’s what drives me on the days I don’t want to do things. I think I have to have that as a goal, but it’s not the be-all and end-all.
“If I get to a point where I can only compete at Nationals and be slightly competitive at that, being here this weekend, I’m pretty comfortable with that. That would be a pretty cool thing,” he adds. Still, here’s hoping the magic of the FA Cup continues.
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