“I still can’t really straighten it,” says Niall Monks, wincing as he stretches his right arm out onto a table.
On Saturday, the 24-year-old rode through the discomfort of a broken elbow as he won the team sprint title at the National Track Championships, his first ever gold medal at the competition.
The event came a month to the day he crashed at a track meet in Newport, Wales, and feared his Nationals bid was over. “It was in the keirin final,” Monks remembers. “There were three of us, and I was just sandwiched in between. I went down, and then my teammate came into the back of me.”
The following day, the track sprinter went to hospital, where X-rays confirmed he had fractured the radial head of his elbow. Might he still be able to race the National Championships? The doctor, resolutely, told him no.
“I assumed that anyway, to be fair,” Monks says. “As soon as I crashed, I thought, ‘Ah that’s bad. That’s me done.'”
A part-time bike mechanic and barman, Monks won two silver medals at the championships last year, and had set his sights set on going a step further this time round. Despite the doctor's advice, he refused to give up hope.
“After a couple of weeks, I went to see the physio, and he said, ‘It’s not going to make it worse if you ride, it’s just going to hurt… a lot’,” he says. “I tried riding, and it was fine. It was hurting a bit because I couldn’t straighten it at the time, but when I went on the bike, it was pain-free, pretty much. It’s weird.”
Fortunately, the pain stayed at bay, too, when Monks ripped out of the start gates in his qualifying heat.
“It only hurts if I’m absolutely flinging it about,” he says, and then points to his opposite shoulder, where he bruised the bone in the crash. “This is more painful than the elbow,” he says, beginning to flex his arm in the air. “Doing that really hurts. This is a lot more limited. I have to make sure I do my physio exercises.”
After qualifying, Monks ceded his place in the starting trio to Lyall Craig, one of GB's new academy recruits. The team, led by Olympic silver medallist – and Monks’s coach – Matthew Richardson, went on to claim gold in the final, winning by six tenths of a second.
“Yesterday, it didn’t feel quite like a proper national title,” Monks says, disappointed not to have raced the final. “But I’m sure it’ll feel better the more I think about it later on. The fact that I almost didn’t race makes it better.”
