Professional Irish cyclist Seán Nolan (20) believes he could have been paralysed after he came off his bicycle after it appears “a trap” was set in a Louth forest where he trains.
Nolan, a member of the EvoPro Racing team, was left with fractured bones in two different vertebrae and four broken ribs after he was brought down in Townley Hall woods in Louth last Friday.
Initially, Nolan believed he had collided with a branch. But his father John went to the forest after the alarm had been raised and found a rope tied between two trees, though it appears that the “trap” had been reset after Nolan’s fall.
“I went over to Townley Hall, as I have hundreds of times before. I went around pretty much all of the trails and then I got myself going in a little loop up at the top of the trails,” he said.
The incident happened three-quarters way through his training: “I had been on maybe five to 10 times already that day. It was a straight line and all of a sudden I went over the handlebars and found myself on my back,” he said.
Nolan had just returned from Belgium from road racing with Ireland’s only professional men’s team, EvoPro Racing, in order to take part in the all-Ireland mountain biking championships on Sunday.
He landed on top of a tree stump and “straight away I was in agony”, he said. “I realised there was something really wrong. I stood up and could not straighten my back and I had this horrible pain in my side in my back.”
Eventually, he managed to get his bike up off the ground and rolled on it through the woods to the main road and rang his father who called for an ambulance. He received oxygen and morphine from the emergency crew. He was then taken to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda.
“I suffered four broken ribs, two fractured bones in two different vertebrae, T11 and T12. It was so close, only a couple of centimetres to my left, [and] instead of breaking the little bones at the side of the vertebrae, I could have damaged my spinal cord. But thank God I didn’t; I also had a partially collapsed lung,” said Nolan.
Nolan is convinced someone deliberately set out to cause harm. “It seems like maybe someone had been watching me and had just decided to put this trap up. Obviously, the person who did this wanted to cause some harm. You do not put a rope or a wire up across a trail that is known to be used by mountain bikers,” he said. Nolan added that he did not believe the rope had been put up by children, or people playing innocently with ropes.
“The way it was put up was in a perfect place to cause damage on a straight [stretch] where you would be up to speed,” he said, adding that he had seen adults in the forest, but not children.
The forest’s owner, Coillte, said it was aware of an incident involving a mountain biker at Townley Hall over the weekend and “an investigation into the incident is currently under way”.
However, it insisted that “Townley Hall is a very popular recreational forest for locals and visitors to the area. Coillte do not operate or authorise any mountain biking trails at Townley Hall.”
A licence must be obtained for any activity other than walking in Coillte-owned forests, it said. “Coillte has no licensed mountain bike activity in our forest at Townley Hall.”
Meanwhile, Nolan has spoken with gardaí, who said they were aware that “an incident had occurred that led to a cyclist being taken to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, Drogheda, to be treated for non-life threatening injuries”.