Painful Truths The Shifting Paradigm of Injury and Setback
Hannah Bergemann’s doctor broke the news over the phone just six weeks before she was set to compete in the most anticipated event of her freeride career: the historic debut of women competing at Red Bull Rampage in 2024. She’d helped lead the charge for women to finally get a spot in the venerated freeride contest in Virgin, Utah, and was considered one of the frontrunners to land on the podium. That dream disintegrated in a moment.
What she hoped was a relatively minor ankle sprain sustained while going slightly deep on a drop turned out to be a torn achilles tendon, dislocated peroneal tendons and torn lateral ligaments that required surgery and months of recovery. Rampage was out.
“I was so devastated,” Bergemann said, months later. “I was just sitting there on the couch. Rampage was the first thing on my mind. Complete devastation was the only emotion I had at that moment.”
As she’s learned to do through experiencing heartbreaking injuries in the past, she gave herself time to feel the initial wave of grief, sadness, and loss of the competitions and filming she had on the schedule. After that, and once the inflammatory phase of her injury had passed, it was time for action. Rehab was her new sport. She scheduled surgery and follow-up visits, dialed in a gym routine, worked on improving her nutrition, supplement, and sleep regimens, and started the mental labor of reframing and positive thinking, a process that sounds a lot easier than it can feel in real time.
“It takes time to accept that you’re on this new path, then to try and find these things that are positive on this path,” she said. “At first it’s like, ‘This is horrible, I’m missing all the things I had planned.’ All you can feel is devastation.”
Along with focusing on those positives, Bergemann did something with this injury that she hasn’t done much of in the past: opened up. Posting on social media while injured never came naturally to her—it feels far easier to throw up a riding clip she’s excited about—but she pushed herself to talk about her specific injury, how her recovery was going, and steps she was taking to optimize her healing time. The vulnerability wasn’t comfortable, but the responses to the authenticity portrayed in her posts from fellow athletes and fans made it feel worthwhile and useful.
“I know it helps me when I get injured to look at someone else’s posts, see what they’re doing, their timelines, it can be an inspiration when you’re laid up” Bergemann said. “I tried to be more intentional with posting when I was injured this time, and I’ve never gotten so many messages from people with similar injuries, asking me about my process, timelines and advice. It was cool to see it come full circle. It helps with the isolation feeling, too.”
She’s not the only one. Bergemann is part of a growing cohort of high-profile mountain bikers who are sharing their very real struggles to recover from complicated injuries and setbacks on public platforms. Boosted by the mainstream trend of normalizing conversations around mental health, these athletes are shedding previous taboos and embracing the fact that pushing the boundaries of any sport means injuries are inevitable. And, as competition courses across all disciplines continue to get more technical, the risk versus reward equation has only become more omnipresent in the day-to-day existence of professionals.
The conversation around injury recovery is also evolving. For example, World Cup downhill stars Tahnée Seagrave and Myriam Nicole have spoken openly in recent years about the challenges of navigating the uncertainty that accompanies bad concussions, particularly the unexpectedly wide range of symptoms and non-linear path to recovery. By opening up, they’ve eschewed fears of losing followers in the name of helping others understand the complexity of these non-visible injuries.
Amaury Pierron and Harriet Burbidge-Smith, both of whom sustained severe spinal injuries in 2023 and 2024, respectively, shared in raw emotion on multiple online platforms the mental anguish of battling through loneliness, loss of identity, and self-doubt while dealing with the fallout of those injuries and long roads to recovery.
That kind of openness is a healthy trend because it helps the sport mature, said Paul Miller, a mental performance specialist at Red Bull’s Athlete Performance Center near Salzburg, Austria.
“It’s super positive if athletes are able to do that for the community, but you have to look at the individual. It’s not good for everyone, but for sure it’s good for the community because it matures andit learns more about certain injuries,” Miller said.
“Especially in a sport like mountain biking that has a really tight community. For example, look at soccer, that’s global, you don’t hear about that one person who has ruptured his ACL or her ACL, but in a tight community people know what’s going on, they know who’s injured, they know how they go through injury.”
And while progress is certainly being made in the realm of transparency, especially when compared to the early, far more reckless days of the sport, there is still a general tendency across the industry to gloss over the critical journey between injury and comeback. This can send a message that injuries are no big deal when, in fact, they are often career, or even life-changing.
Miranda Miller, a Canadian former downhill world champion and multi-time national champ, started noticing a trend of downplaying injuries over the past couple of years, even dubbing 2024 “the year of normalizing the broken back,” when she saw repeated social media captions brushing off potentially severe spinal injuries with language that almost characterized them as minor inconveniences. When the 2025 season started on a similar note after high-profile riders suffered big crashes and major injuries at early-season competitions, it prompted her to publish a post pushing for more authenticity.
“For the sake of the kids coming up in the sport, I’d love to see their heroes be more open about their experiences,” Miller wrote. “Concussions are no small thing, and breaking your back is not normal. Something as ‘simple’ as breaking both my arms literally changed my life—I haven’t ridden pain-free since.”
Miller knows all about downplaying injuries. She did it throughout her early career, always coming back before she was ready because she never felt she had the financial or career stability to be truly honest with herself about the time she needed to recover, nor did she have the resources to understand what full recovery looked like. A concussion in 2019 scared her into taking a different path.
“I was just like, ‘I don’t care how long it takes me to come back, I just know that I can’t feel like this forever, this is torture,’” she said. “That was the thing that shifted my mindset. At that moment, I was like, ‘Biking is everything to me, but it’s not worth feeling like a crazy person,’ because that’s how the concussion was making me feel. As a young rider, you are going to try to come back as quickly as possible but maybe if there were education or resources, or someone who could guide you from experience, I think it would make a big difference. Being more open is literally going to advance the sport. It’s going to make the sport more professional.”
Her post elicited scores of supportive comments from her peers, and a few direct messages from parents of high-profile athletes thanking her for broaching the topic publicly. The point, Miller said, wasn’t to fearmonger or discourage the risks that often lead to progression, but to encourage influential athletes to present a more complete view of their careers, to celebrate the highs and be more honest about the lows. She points to Pierron and Nicole’s “Racer” video series and Burbidge-Smith’s vlogs on her personal YouTube channel as examples of documentation that show the setbacks and triumphs in a real and informative light.
“It wouldn’t hurt for the heroes of the sport to show what they have to do to come back so younger kids who don’t have that support can learn,” Miller said. “I think everyone feels pretty lonely and secluded when they’re injured. People are like, ‘Oh, that sucks,’ but they never quite understand. Even just being able to follow your hero through simple injury—at least they can relate to that in a world where everyone shares everything on social media anyway.”
Miller’s words resonated deeply with Katrina Strand, a fellow Canadian and former high-level downhill racer who sustained a laundry list of broken bones and other injuries—many chronic—throughout her career. She now works to develop athletes as a skills coach with a practice entrenched in the mental aspects of training.
“Every single injury, no matter how small, is with you for life,” Strand said. “It may not feel it at the time—it changes you physically and mentally for life. I think we’re doing each other a disservice being flippant about it. Being injured is a very, very lonely activity. Nobody can step in and give you a break. If you don’t feel alone and see others that have gone through it, it’s quite cathartic and healing.”
Oftentimes, choosing to talk about adversity comes down to self-awareness and understanding whether sharing your story is a positive for you, like it ultimately was for Bergemann, or a detriment, especially if you’re already struggling to adjust mentally, said Paul Miller. The life of a professional athlete can be complex. While it can look like a dream life from the outside, riding and training all day in lieu of a ho-hum 9 to 5 desk job isn’t an easy venture. Pressures around competition or to “make it” in an indeterminate amount of time can be difficult to relate to if you aren’t also living in that world. Some worry that writing about an injury will come across as complaining or ungrateful to the general population who doesn’t always understand the full range of dynamics at play.
“For some, it’s a processing of their own situation, for others it’s difficult to talk about it and to share something about it every time they have to do it, so they just avoid it,” Miller said. “I wouldn’t say there is a better way, that there’s a right or wrong. I definitely see many times in the APC athletes [share their whole comeback stories], but you need a lot of confidence and also trust in yourself. You need to be a certain character to do that. It’s not for everyone. Some people if they’re injured, they prefer to be by themselves and hide themselves and try to get through that phase by themselves.”
If the industry is to evolve in terms of transparency, it shouldn’t only fall on athletes to shoulder the responsibility—race organizers, race teams, and sponsors can all grow and be held more accountable when it comes to better communication around high-profile injuries. There is also work to be done to institute better concussion and post-injury protocols that take the subjectivity out of whether an athlete can keep competing after certain injuries, especially at the highest levels of racing.
“Being truthful about injury, about its impact, about repercussions short and long term is everybody’s responsibility. Nobody bears more responsibility than the other,” Strand said.
Honesty goes hand-in-hand with vulnerability, and it can take athletes time to develop the strength, resilience, and security to be more open. Often getting to that point requires navigating through a deep loss of identity that can accompany big career shifts such as injury or retirement.
At the APC, Miller and his colleagues work with athletes on this aspect of the mental journey. While mountain bikers tend to have stronger communities than many other athletes, and therefore are not quite as susceptible to fully losing their identities in the case of an injury, it is always a factor, he said.
“You’re always seen as this mountain biker and as soon as you’re off the bike, people are way less interested in you,” Miller said. “This is a big topic we work on with athletes to understand that there’s an athlete and a person, and that the person should not be too affected by the athlete.”
One of the first things longtime Trek Factory Racing team manager Andrew Shandro does when he starts working with new, younger racers is encourage them to build a solid support system. Family support can be critical, as can a physio, or a sports psychologist to work on the mental side of things. Trainers, massage therapists, and strength and conditioning coaches all act as investments in mind and body that lead to career longevity, Shandro said.
“The level of athletes we have, you’re going to get injured. It’s not if, it’s when you get injured, so it’s how to manage it, training your body to take an impact,” he said. “If it’s a big one, you need to have that trainer to understand the sport, build shoulder, wrist, head, neck strength, how to mitigate whiplash, understand concussions, understanding what you need to be a better athlete. When it occurs, we have an osteopath and a physio at the races, but when you get home, who’s there to help you?”
This preparation and foundation laid early on can make the difference between clawing back from an injury, or facing the reality of a dream slipping away.
“That’s the brutal part of the sport. It can spit you out fast,” Shandro said.
For Bergemann, even though she felt mentally strong and positive about the ways in which she was refocusing her time off the bike, when the time came for Rampage just a few weeks post-op, she felt nervous to go to the desert, fearing that witnessing the monumental competition unfold from the side- lines would be a mental setback. “I had a lot of anxiety going into it, thinking I would feel super left out, super bummed because I was supposed to be there,” she said. “But once I got there I was so happy to be there. It was therapeutic to see it come to fruition after all the buildup, and to support my friends—it was almost as satisfying as being part of it. They’re all my close friends so to see them accomplish their goals, it was amazing, almost as cool being in it myself. It was so special.”
Four months later she was back atop a podium, taking second place at the Natural Selection freeride tour stop in New Zealand, well on her way to reaching her big end-of-season 2025 goal: Rampage.
