Jackson Medway is lucky to be alive. In 2024, the 20-year-old Australian had two massive crashes involving other vehicles, either one of which could easily have ended his life. But now, as a new season begins, he’s fully recovered from a long list of injuries and is about to begin the next phase of his career in Europe.
2024 started about as well as it could have. Less than a year after he was racing B-grade criteriums in Brisbane, the then-19-year-old Medway won Australia’s U23 individual time trial title. He then found his way to the Tour Down Under with the Australian national team where he earned the most competitive rider prize after a long breakaway on stage 4. He had a long day out front at Cadel’s Race as well, before winning the Oceania U23 ITT title in April.
Despite being such a young and inexperienced rider, it was clear Medway had a huge engine and even bigger potential. Indeed, based on his early-season trajectory, it seemed less about whether there’d be interest from pro teams for 2025 but rather which team the 191 cm Queenslander would end up with.
And so when Medway headed over to Europe with BridgeLane in late April, he was understandably excited, confident, and hopeful of posting some strong results to help secure a pro contract. But then, in just his third day of racing in Europe, on stage 3 of the Ronde de l’Isard in southern France, disaster struck.
“It was probably about 30 km into the race; it was during break formation,” Medway tells Escape via video call from his home in Brisbane. “We were racing along this wide highway, and I was going probably 50 or 60 km an hour in a break of about four, and then we got caught. As soon as I got caught, the rest of my little breakaway gave up, and I attacked straight away again and was going solo.
“I looked back and I had a little bit of a gap, but in that instant after I looked back I received a direct hit at high speed from behind by one of the race’s ‘safety motorcycles’. There was no warning whatsoever – I got catapulted into the air and broke my femur immediately upon impact. I have an impact scar in the shape of a motorbike clutch lever imprinted on my upper hamstring – exactly where the break was. Somehow, that was my only broken bone despite the peloton reporting that I was somersaulted over two metres in the air at high speed.
“I don’t know exactly how fast the motorcycle was going, but witnesses reported that it could have been 100 to 110 kilometres an hour. So it was a pretty horrific scene. It definitely wasn’t ideal for 2024. I had some big goals, which were ruled out just in that instant.”
Medway says there’s a period of around a minute post-crash that’s lost to his memory. His body was in shock.
“A minute and a half after, I already had half my team back around me,” he recalls. “I just kind of got back with it with adrenaline, and was able to communicate with them for about 30 seconds before realising how much pain I was really in.”
Thus began a torrid few hours for the young Queenslander.
“The next 90 minutes are probably the worst experience of my life,” he says. “In those French races, they don’t carry anything else but Panadol drip [intravenous paracetamol]. So there’s nothing stronger. But in Australia, you have green whistles [methoxyflurane inhaler] and stuff like that.
“So we’re in the middle of the Pyrenees and I was just laying there. They were doing the best that they could but I was in the back of an ambulance, I had the little pulse thing going, and I could see it was just about 210-215 [bpm] for that whole hour, just waiting for them to fly in some morphine from Toulouse. That was crazy. Never been through something like that.”
Medway says he’s grateful to his teammates and BridgeLane sports director Simon Lhuilier for making sure his parents were notified immediately about the crash. Meanwhile, Medway was lying in agony, waiting for stronger pain medication and constantly trying to find a position that was something close to tolerable.
“I was just laying there, on my side,” he says. “My left leg was straight and my right leg was flopped over, and rounded over my left leg. Because for some reason that was the only place that didn’t hurt so so much. I was able to tolerate it without the painkillers. Don’t get me wrong, it sucked, but if I just stayed really still like that, it was all right.”
Eventually a helicopter arrived – with morphine on board. Medway’s leg was put into traction, and the young Australian was airlifted to hospital in Toulouse. He was operated on that evening to insert a rod and screws into his leg. His journey to recovery was only just beginning.
“I was in hospital for almost two and a half weeks,” he says. “That was bloody mind-numbing. When you don’t speak their language and you just have no one to talk to, you’re just laying there like ‘What has happened?’ I didn’t know in the moment what had actually happened, until the hours in hospital, really thinking back to it.
“My dad flew in probably three days later. When he got up there he was pretty sad, but it was good to have him there and hear an Australian voice.”
Medway flew back to Australia a few weeks after the crash, but that brought its own challenges. He developed several blood clots along the way, including a deep vein thrombosis which, he says, “was pretty serious” in itself. He would be on blood thinners for three months.
When Medway got home to Brisbane, the real rehab began.
“It was pretty slow to get going because I wasn’t allowed to weight-bear at all because my fracture was quite severe,” Medway recalls. “It was in four pieces, so I wasn’t able to put any weight on it for six or seven weeks. Not being allowed to even touch the ground for that long was definitely a challenge; I was at home hopping around.”
Medway worked with renowned physiotherapist Victor Popov and quickly made progress. Five weeks after the crash he was on his indoor trainer spinning his legs over – before he’d even put his foot on the ground.
Medway’s riding would be mostly confined to the trainer for the coming months – he wasn’t given the all-clear to ride outside until he could walk, and the blood thinners in his system meant the risk of a crash was too high.
But in early August, Medway got two screws taken out of his leg and was given the all clear to ride on the road again, mainly doing zone 2 endurance work. He continued to progress well, and by late September he was even back at his first race – an A-grade criterium in Brisbane.
“It was great to be there and great to race again, but the best thing about it was that I felt like I was able to race from the front already, only after doing some zone 2 hours,” he says. “So I was very happy with how I was going.”
Medway was riding high and on a great trajectory. But then, just a few days after that encouraging crit, on a regular training ride, disaster struck again.
“I was just on my way home, about 40-50 minutes from home, and I was riding down one of these local climbs, which I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of times,” Medway says.
He came around a corner at around 60 km/h and spotted a car on the other side of the road, in a turning lane, preparing to turn right across his path.
“It had slowed to a stop, but all of a sudden, she just turned in front of me leaving me with nowhere to go,” he recalls. “I was like ‘Surely not – she’s got to see me. This isn’t happening.’ Meanwhile, I was already jamming on the brakes. I couldn’t stop in time, but I just knew I had to jam them on as there was no avoiding this car. She failed to give way like I wasn’t even there – it was such a leisurely manoeuvre. I smashed straight into the passenger’s side door and stopped instantly like I was hitting a brick wall.
“It was pretty gut-wrenching to be laying on that road and looking at the sky just knowing I had to go through this rehab again. I knew instantly, when I couldn’t breathe, the whole inside of my body was shutting down. I knew something was pretty badly wrong.
“I broke a lot of bones. It was actually 11 ribs I broke. I had five pelvis fractures. I had two fractures in my lower spine. I had a fractured left hand, had a grade three laceration to my liver. I had a laceration to my kidney, I had a collapsed lung. It was a massive, massive crash.”
If Medway had recovered well from his broken femur, then his recovery from this second crash was nothing short of incredible.
“After a few days in ICU, I could see – just because I’m young and healthy – that everything was progressing so so fast,” he recalls with a smile. “They told me I was going to be in there for two, three, four weeks, but I ended up being in there for only a week. It was three days in the ICU and four days in the ward. I was able to avoid having any surgery and I left hospital with only a slight limp, one crutch, and a splint on my hand. It was remarkable.”
While he still faced a long road back to full health, Medway says he was much better equipped to deal with that process the second time around.
“I’d built such a really good support crew around me after that first one, I just became so dialed with how to deal with such a thing,” he says. “I dealt with it well mentally and I knew physically that I could come back after that crit I was talking about. I just knew I could get back quickly.”
Less than a month post-crash Medway was back riding on the trainer. Less than seven weeks post-crash, he was back riding on the road. Now, a little more than three months since the incident, he’s fully recovered.
“I have absolutely zero pain at the moment,” he says. “Obviously, I’ve got a rod in my leg, but I’m feeling great which is fantastic.
“It doesn’t even make sense. I’ve had two life-threatening [crashes], I could have died in both instances, and I’d only just fully recovered from the first one when the second one happened. I consider myself lucky that my femur held up strongly after crashing on that same side. It’s just remarkable that I’m feeling well and that my fitness is progressing fast after such a rocky year.”
Understandably, having two serious crashes has changed Medway’s outlook on life a little. In fact, he can even see the positives from those crashes.
“I feel like I’ve become so resilient from it,” he says. “What I’ve noticed is that little things just don’t bother me anymore. Before I went to Europe last year, for instance, I’d never really broken many bones before, so I often worried about peloton crashes, thinking that a simple collarbone break could be the worst. But now that just doesn’t even faze me.
“There’s so many things that just don’t worry me now; it’s actually helped so much. And I can apply that off the bike too. I’ve become so much more mature from it, and I know how to reach out to family and friends that are always there for me. Apart from these injuries, it’s been really good for me as a person.”
It was in the 2024 Australian summer of racing that Medway really started to make a name for himself, but we won’t see him returning to Nationals, TDU, or Cadel’s Race in 2025. Instead, he’s about to jet off to Europe to set up a life over there, having signed with the Tudor Pro Cycling U23 development team. After the year he’s had, he feels very fortunate to have received a contract at all.
“I was laying in hospital after that first crash, and I thought, ‘Oh well now I have absolutely no results in Europe,’” he says. “I crashed in my third day there. I thought I was pretty much finished. But I had my manager, Andrew McQuaid from Trinity Sports Management – he dropped into the hospital twice. He actually drove down from Andorra and he spoke to me, and was confident, and I was confident that I could get back.”
McQuaid worked hard behind the scenes to get Medway a contract while the 19-year-old was, in his own words, “rotting away in Brisbane” as other U23 prospects around the world were posting results. One morning, McQuaid texted Medway to say he’d found a ride for the young Australian, and after some visa and tax issues were resolved, Medway signed on with Tudor for two years.
His gratitude is obvious. With Medway’s 2024 team BridgeLane folding at the end of the year, the Queenslander believes he would have had little chance of progressing in his career had it not been for the Tudor contract. In fact, he says, “this opportunity with Tudor may have saved my career.”
“I’m just so grateful for Andrew McQuaid,” he continues. “I couldn’t believe that he’d done that. I only had a good January, the rest was unknown. I could have done good rides over there [in Europe], but you just never know.
“And then, second of all, I’m just so grateful for Tudor, for understanding and taking a gamble on me, really. So hopefully one day I can pay them back. That’s my biggest goal: just pay them back and potentially turn pro with them in a year or two’s time.” Medway is also grateful to his BridgeLane sports director Simon Lhuilier for “going above and beyond”, driving Medway to hospital on several occasions to ensure he got the best medical care.
Medway will now go and build a European base in Girona, Spain, where he’ll live with fellow Brisbane riders Matt Greenwood (with Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale’s development team in 2025) and Bailey McDonald (Novo Nordisk in 2025). Medway doesn’t know what his calendar will look like in 2025 – he’ll find that out at the team’s January training camp – but he’s expecting to start racing in March, and hopes to line up at the Baby Giro and Tour de l’Avenir later in the season (the two most prestigious stage races on the U23 men’s calendar). He’d also like to guest ride with the Tudor ProTeam at some stage if he can, ideally in a stage race featuring his strongest discipline: a time trial.
“Hopefully the form comes along well, and I can go for a good TT result and see where I stack up against the best in the world,” he says.
After the 2024 he had, and the list of injuries he accrued, it’s remarkable that Medway is even in a position to make that a goal. People often express their sympathy to Medway about how bad his crashes were, but he’s just grateful they weren’t worse.
“I don’t understand how I’ve managed to not hit my head in both of those instances and die,” he says. “That car was just a sedan. The only reason I wasn’t finished was because it was a sedan – a low car where my head just missed it. I hit everything below it.
“It’s just these little things where I wonder ‘How on Earth am I still here?’ It’s so nuts to me. I’ve probably been the luckiest person out of the unluckiest situations. I’m super, super grateful.”
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