For Quillan Isidore, the national BMX round in Birmingham in early March was a disaster that ended any hope he had of making the Olympics in Tokyo.
“The race was due to start,” he recalls. “I was just doing a quick 20-minute warm up on the track and had a big crash.”
Medics were unable to realign his dislocated shoulder for eleven hours, and for the first time in his career he cried, as much with the excruciating physical pain as the emotion of knowing his Olympic dream was written off.
“I'm getting a bit older and I thought, how much more can I take,” he says. “This was the worst injury ever.”
A few days later the extent of the Covid-19 pandemic became clear and the Olympics were postponed. With that, Isidore had been extraordinarily lucky.
“It's a blessing in disguise for me, everything being cancelled,” he admits. “It's mad how things turn out.”
Senior national champion in 2019 after three consecutive silver medals, and ranked third in a fight for selection with Kyle Evans and Kye Whyte, he was confident, if everything had gone to plan, he would have been part of the Great Britain squad in Japan this summer.
“I started performing really well at the back end of last year, making World Cup finals and finishing top 16 in the world consistently,” he says. “But Kye won the World Cup, and at only 19 that's pretty special.”
This was Isidore’s third major injury since riding for the first time at the age of 9. One evening after gymnastics training in Brockwell Park, Brixton, he saw the riders at the BMX track. A few days later he returned with his mountain bike.
“As a kid I was buzzing that I got my front wheel in the air,” he remembers. “I thought it was the best thing ever.”
He started going regularly, sometimes just to sit and watch the club riders, hooked on the speed, the jumps, the racing, even the burst out of the gates at the start. He begged his mum, and for his next birthday received his first BMX. Always tall and athletic for his age, he won races without much training, just “riding and having fun”, and was “buzzing” again as he soon won his first trophy.
From there, Isidore was scouted by British Cycling but suffered a setback at the trials in Manchester when he didn’t make the cut.
“I was gutted,” he says. “I thought, I'm going to work really hard to get onto the team. That next year I won my third consecutive British title and I got onto the programme. From then on I took it so serious.”
Isidore’s improvement was exponential, a result of his obsession for the sport. He did not care much for school, and would just think about BMX all day.
“I admit that I used to milk it with the teachers,” he says. “I’d say I’d been training to get away with [not studying] because I didn't care about school. I was purely focused on BMX.”
But his mum guided him, insisting he could only race if he did his homework, and he could not afford for any bad reports to get back to his coach.
As a young teenager, Isidore’s physical power meant he was beating much older competitors in England. In 2011, aged 14, he went to the World Championships in Denmark, confident that he would win against opposition his own age.
“I finished 64th and I was devastated,” he says. “Something changed in me. I knew I had to work so much harder the following year to win in my home country.”
A year older and much improved, he won in Birmingham to become u-16 boys’ world champion. After repeated disappointments, he had gone to Birmingham knowing it was his time.
“It didn't really come as a shock to me because I knew I had worked so hard for it,” he says. “But I think it came as a shock to everyone else because I was nobody to them.”
At school, his peers would bow in the corridors to salute the champion. His teachers debated whether he needed qualifications at all, such might be the success that awaited. Then he suffered the first of those major injuries, somewhat poetically in the middle of his GCSEs.
In a race he describes as “just a national” he came off, breaking both ankles and a wrist in one go. Weeks, miserable and moody, in hospital followed, during which he was still forced to take exams. Some doctors told him he would probably not ride again but, defiant, he “just ignored them straight up”. He tried to come back too soon, and what should have been four months of rehabilitation became eight.
“I went from being a champion to turning up to a European race and getting absolutely smoked by everybody I used to beat easily,” he remembers. “It was really hard to take.”
Nowadays he understands the importance of recovery, but at 15 he just wanted to race. British Cycling supported him throughout, but two years passed before he was back performing at the highest level. The experience as a youth prepared him for breaking his femur in 2017.
“I dealt with that like it was nothing,” he says. “I was absolutely fine with it.”
Life has changed since the evenings training as a kid in Brixton and avoiding as much schoolwork as his mother would allow. There is pressure, but he has lots of time to relax, and the support of a team of coaches and medics in “the best federation in the world”.
“It's hard in terms of trying to get the best out of myself,” he says. “Delivering and having the mental strength, that's very difficult, but in terms of my lifestyle it's pretty much easy.”
He races regularly in Europe, and during a “ridiculous” few weeks in 2019 competed consecutively in Derby, Belgium, the US, Argentina, Japan, and Indonesia. Despite the international glitz, the same values that guided the 9-year-old Isidore, who was buzzing doing a wheelie, persist undiminished; focus, obsession, humility and hard work. He has been knocked back and defeated, and has come close to losing it from his hospital bed. But the pandemic has offered him another chance at the Olympics he craves.
Some of his mother’s advice seems to have rubbed off too. He is doing coaching qualifications and has one eye on a potential career in property development. Cycling is the priority until at least Paris 2024, but like when he was sitting exams with both legs in plaster, there is no harm in preparing for the next step.
And it would be foolish to bet against seeing him in Tokyo, and then again in Paris.
“Whatever someone is good at, if they truly believe and have a passion for it, then they should pursue it, because they can achieve success,” he says.
As we close, I suggest it might work for him if one of Evans and Whyte dislocates their shoulder during Olympic qualification.
“I wouldn't wish that on anyone,” he says with a smile. “I just wish I beat them. I'd be able to take it on the chin if they were the better people to go.
“But I fully back myself.”
