Brammeier’s bounce back to the big time

They started their cycling careers as teenage friends but the road that has taken Irish rider Matt Brammeier to the HTC Columbia team of Mark Cavendish has been a lot more undulating than the one travelled by the world’s fastest sprinter.

Listening to Brammeier quip that he knows all about kicking Cavendish’s arse puts the fine line between making it as a Pro Tour rider and having an old war story to entertain your pub mates into sharp perspective.

Their friendship stretches back to 1998 and the time they were thirteen years old when Cavendish used to take the ferry from the Isle of Man to compete in races throughout Great Britain.

The duo were ferociously competitive with lofty ambitions to ride the Tour de France but managed to put their rivalry aside when the Brammeier family invited Cavendish to stay at their family home in Liverpool.

The Manxman took the opportunity to base himself in Merseyside and the duo set about riding and winning as many races as possible on their way to securing places in the British Cycling Academy.

By 2006 Brammeier had progressed to the DFL-Cyclingnews-Litespeed team while Cavendish was cutting his teeth in Team Sparkasse, another continental outfit which served as a feeder to the former T-Mobile team for whom he turned pro for the 2007 season.

Brammeier continued to progress at the Profel Ziegler Continental Team through 2007 but a serious collision with a cement truck during a winter training ride left him with injuries which threatened to end his career just weeks after extending his contract for the 2008 season.

“The truck turned left on a roundabout and drove over me. I hit the floor but managed to avoid getting tangled up in the wheels. It just missed my head. It didn’t knock me out but it was one lucky escape,” Brammeier recalls.

The accident left him with two broken legs with the breaks to his left femur and right fibula greatly reducing his prospects of ever returning to the peloton while also consigning him to a painstaking routine of physiotherapy which continued for months.

“Initially I was asking would I ever get back on my bike again. It was very difficult at the time and it went through my head that I might not get back, but as soon as I got out of hospital, when I knew how severe the injuries were, I knew that I could get back and I didn’t think about anything else but that. I was 100 per cent focused on that,” he tells Irish Pro Cycling.

“I had to have an operation on my left leg and it had a pin and rod inserted into the bone and I couldn’t bend it at the knee. The first step was just trying to get movement back into the knee, just stretching it, basic monotonous stuff two, three and four times a day.”

Gradually the process of completing up to four gym and physiotherapy sessions a day began to pay off and within three months Brammeier attempted a short twenty minute bike ride.

“The motivation to stick at it came from being a bike rider. You are used to working hard, trying to move on and to get better. It was the same. Each day I was trying to get better, doing more physio, lifting more weights, sticking at it. It was hard but I never lacked any determination,” he explained.

Brammeier credits a number of people for their support during his recovery but is especially grateful to the Profel Ziegler team and to the Dave Rayner Fund for their assistance.

“The team where incredibly supportive, they kept paying me, and the Dave Rayner Fund paid for my physio. They were a massive part of me coming back and without them there was just no way I could have done it, the team was especially helpful and they wanted me in,” he adds.

The 25 year old repaid his team’s loyalty when he returned to racing in May of 2008, just as his old friend Cavendish was building the form which was to deliver four stage wins at his first Tour de France.

Brammeier’s base in the Flemish town of Aarschot in Belgium helped him to readjust to life in the peloton and by 2009 he had secured a new contract with the An Post Sean Kelly team which proved to be the first step on a new road towards realising his true potential.
 
He credits his former teammate David O’Loughlin for introducing him to the Irish team set-up and for inspiring him to declare for Ireland by taking advantage of the fact that his mother’s parents, the Colemans, were natives of Connemara.

“It came about from talking to David O’Loughlin. He was trying to talk me into doing some track racing because they needed another team pursuitor, but riding for the Irish team seemed like the right thing to do when I looked at it, it has more to offer.

“I called Tommy Evans, the track coach, and he was interested straight away. He invited me to a training camp and to do some tests and I just wanted to be part of it. It has proven to be a very good move. Winning the national championships never crossed my mind at the time but that was the big result this year that moved everything on,” he added.

Brammeier rode an incredibly tactical race during the national championships in Sligo escaping in the decisive break of the day before seeing off defending champion Nicolas Roche (AG2R La Mondiale) in a two-man sprint for the line.

“It was awesome to win the national jersey and to beat riders of that quality. Wearing the jersey means a lot to me and it meant a lot to the team. When I came back to Belgium they said I couldn’t wear it because they thought I was the amateur champion but I was delighted to let them know that I was the pro champion and that I could wear the jersey,” he said.

His achievement secured his place on the Irish team for the World Championships in Geelong, Australia where he instigated an early five man break which stayed away for 200 kilometres, with his performance copperfastening his deal with the HTC Columbia team.

“I don’t know what it was about this year. I didn’t really change anything. I just kept committed to cycling, training hard and racing hard and doing everything I could right. It just clicked into place this year,” he said.

His arrival at Pro Tour level gives Irish cycling fans plenty to look forward to in 2011 and Brammeier has already talked to the team sports director Brian Holm to plan his season around riding as part of Cavendish’s lead out train.

His unrelenting determination and ambition is also focused on securing one of the nine places on the team’s Tour de France squad, and he looking forward to working with Cavendish whose 23 Grand Tour stage wins have established him as one of the world’s greatest riders.

“It means that I’m going to have to put up with him again. It should be a good laugh but it’s going to be pretty strange riding for him, especially when I’ve grown up kicking his arse,” he remarked.

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