After brutal crash at the Tour of Utah, Matt Brammeier returns home to Great Britain

After his terrible crash at the Tour of Utah, when he collided with a team car during stage 6, Matt Brammeier of MTN-Qhubeka has returned home to the United Kingdom, the team announced in a prepared statement.

The cyclist has been convalescing at Salt Lake City’s University of Utah Hospital since the accident.

Brammeier’s crash happened as he was descending fast from the second-to-last climb of stage 6, and driving hard to catch up with the peloton. As he approached Guardsman’s Pass, a hairpin turn on the way down, his powerful momentum carried him at high speed into the side of a team car. Video footage of the accident, which Canadian Cycling Magazine shared earlier in the week, is almost painful to watch.

As reported at the time of the accident, the injuries Brammeier sustained — a bruised liver, fractured teeth, broken ribs on either side of his biody, and fractures to his sacral and pelvic bones — looked like they marked the end of the Irish cyclist’s season. After returning home, Brammeier himself confirmed that. “It’s looking like my season is well and truly over,” MTN-Qhubeka’s statement reported Brammeier as saying, “so I’m looking forward to returning hungry in 2016.”

Before getting back in the saddle, though, medical officials with the team said that Brammeier has a few weeks of recovery ahead of him. But on a positive note, some of the injuries the 30-year-old rider sustained aren’t quite as bad as initially feared.

“His chest injuries are not as severe as was first feared and his pain is already far better, said Jarrad van Zuydam, MTN-Qhubeka’s tea mdoctor. “We don’t expect him back on a bike for at least the next 6-8 weeks, but we are confident he will make a full recovery and a return to racing at the top level.”

As ever, the team’s release indicated, Brammeier is focusing on the positive as he comes out from under the fallout of his Utah crash.

“I’m still in a fair bit of pain,” he said, “but overall, considering what I just hobbled away from, I can’t grumble for one second.”