Lucinda Brand is starting up her cyclocross season at the third race of the UCI World Cup series in Dendermonde on Sunday, having been sidelined through the early races after a crash on the road at the Simac Ladies Tour left her with a shoulder injury that required surgery and a considerable recovery period.
It's the second year running that the Baloise Trek Lions rider, who rides with Lidl-Trek on the road, has had a disrupted start to the cyclocross season as last year Brand suffered a break in one of the bones in her hand in October, which meant she missed out on defending her European title.
The length of her recovery period after the acromioclavicular joint injury and surgery this year has meant she again had to miss out on the European title race this year. Still the November start means she will now have time to build toward February's Cyclo-cross World Championships, a race Brand won in 2021 and also stood on the podium at in the last two editions.
”Once the races started I was just super excited and motivated to work super hard to join the pack again and also the boys from our team are racing so well so it was super inspiring me to work even harder," said Brand of her injury recovery on the Dirty Talks podcast with Maghalie Rochette which was released this week but recorded before the European Championships on the weekend.
"But it's also of course really difficult to know where I am," said Brand when asked by Rochette how she felt about returning to the fray. "So once I am around the first race I am definitely going to be very nervous.”
Before her Simac Tour crash Brand had a solid season on the road, once again acting as a valuable ally for her Lidl-Trek teammates and also claiming a time trial victory and the overall win at the Baloise Ladies Tour. The 34-year-old also said at the time of the injury that it would be difficult to be on the sidelines again as she had been looking forward to finding her form of two cyclocross seasons ago, when she won the World Championships, European title as well as the World Cup series.
Brand was able to start physiotherapy to get back full mobility of her shoulder four weeks after the surgery and, after starting with short indoor rides, was then able to work back to riding outside. The Baloise Trek Lions team announced early this week that she would return to racing on the November 12 World Cup in Dendermonde, Belgium, where the build to top racing form would begin.
“I think I am on 95% from what it should be so that’s really good," said Brand in the podcast. "I basically can do everything but sometimes I feel that I have less power but that’s it.”
