In 2023, on the first stage of his and Uno-X Mobility’s first Tour de France, Torstein Træen hit the deck: the first crash and the first casualty of that year’s race. He limped to the finish that day, and then the next, and then all the way to Paris, arms covered in gauze and worse injuries within: He rode the remaining 3,000 km with a broken elbow. Wasn’t that bad, he said, especially once he’d crashed again, wounding his knee and back a week later.
Iain Treloar
The Uno-X team kit back then had the phrase ‘MOT’ on the backside – a Norwegian anti-bullying and mental health charity, but also the word ‘Courage.' Every time you saw Træen that Tour, that felt pretty appropriate – especially if you dug into his backstory, finding out about the testicular cancer diagnosis of a year earlier, discovered after some concerning values in a routine anti-doping test.
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