- Paralympic triathlete on using sport to recover from brain injury sustained in crash.
George Peasgood has a matter-of-fact answer to a question about his bountiful positivity. “I’m better off today than I was on 2 October.”
It is a life-affirming statement to which there is no other response than to agree. That was his 27th birthday, a day that should have been one of celebration but was instead one of great distress and fear, his family by his hospital bedside told to expect the worst.
The day before, British Paralympic triathlete Peasgood was out for a bike ride with his girlfriend Frankie Hall, testing himself on sprints, when a freak accident saw his foot slip out of the pedal, hurling him over his handlebars at speed.
Suffering seizures at the roadside and bleeding from his ears, he was blue-lighted to hospital where he was diagnosed with a brain injury, specifically a grade three diffuse axonal injury, and entered into the deepest level of coma. To this day he has no recollection of the crash.
“Everything was touch and go,” Peasgood tells BBC Sport.
“Frankie and my parents were told many times not to expect me to survive, which must have been really hard for them.
“I do get upset sometimes – they went through all of that.”
Peasgood was in a coma “for about seven or eight weeks”, but the turn of a new year marked renewed hope.
By January he was starting to retain information. “The first time I remembered something from the day before was 4 January,” he says. “On 13 January – 13 being my lucky number – I felt like I’d woken up from a dream.
“Everything from October, November, December up until 13 January felt like a dream.”
His memories of the days, weeks and even months leading up to his crash are few and far between – a Coldplay concert, a run around London’s Hyde Park with Frankie, his cousin coming round on the morning of that fateful day. But new memories will be made and Peasgood is firmly looking to the future.
Six months and two days after his crash, Peasgood – who won Para-triathlon silver and Para-cycling bronze at Tokyo 2020 – left hospital in April and is now living at The Get Busy Living Centre in Leicestershire, a rehabilitation facility established by the Matt Hampson Foundation.
There, his days are a hive of activity, moving towards his goal of getting his “life back”.
“Every day I have a gym session, I have sports therapy, and then I have a physio session – so three hours of intense rehab. Each week I also have a counselling session,” he says.
“I live in one of the lodges at the moment, so I have to make dinner for myself, I have to get changed by myself, have a shower, do everything by myself.”
Peasgood’s life has been one of adversity and challenges to navigate. Run over by a ride-on lawnmower as a two-year-old, he had 15 surgeries on his left leg, including whole leg reconstruction, before taking up Para-triathlon.
Yet without those past hurdles, he doesn’t think he would be here to tell his story.
“[The crash has] pronounced my disability from before, but I think that’s the reason I’m alive, because I’ve had to overcome things before,” he says.
“I’ve learned to be so stubborn, to never take no for an answer. And I just want my life back, the way it was before my accident. That’s all I want.”
In recent weeks and months, he has run outside, swam in hydrotherapy sessions and cycled on the back of a tandem bike, but whether a return to triathlon is on the cards in the future remains to be seen.
“I’m not thinking about competing at all. At the moment, I just want to be able to live the exact same as before. The aim at the moment is just to get my life back, everything outside of sport, but I’m using sport to get there.
“I was as close to death as can be, so every day is a positive. Every day is a step forward from there.”
