World Cup: Canadian cyclist Hugo Barrette returns to scene of gruesome crash
TORONTO — The photos are gruesome. Hugo Barrette slumped over unconscious, his rag-doll limbs bent under him awkwardly and his face crushed against the concrete. Barrette on a stretcher, his face a soupy mess of blood and ripped flesh.
The 25-year-old cyclist from Iles-de-la-Madeleine, a tiny Quebec archipelago in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, had crashed in World Cup training in Cali, Colombia, in the fall of 2015, roaring through a railing at 80 kilometres an hour.
He’ll race in Cali again for the first time this week in a World Cup he said is a victory before he even sets his two wheels on the track.
“It’s part of my story,” Barrette said. “I’ve never seen it as such a bad thing. It’s just part of my story, and to get past that, I need to go back there and perform at my best and just show what I got, as I’ve intended to do before I crashed.”