Emma Davies Jones overcame all the odds to get back on the bike
Emma Davis Jones was always a keen cyclist, but when she broke her back in a horrific car accident in 2005 she feared she'd never race again. In an unbelievably heroic story, Emma has defied all the odd's and come back to racing and is now one of the team captains in the London to Paris ride which kicked off today, FemaleFirst caught up with her to learn why she never gave up.
You were obviously well on your way to becoming a successful cyclist when you made your first appearance for Great Britain in 1995, is cycling what you’ve always wanted to do?
I always wanted to excel at something in my life from when I was very young and that comes from my father who was an Olympic athlete and World Record holder in athletics so I’ve always had an in-built competitive nature and basically I wanted to be good and better than everyone else at something.
I realised quite early on that academia was never going to be it, and my brother is an extremely talented musician so that was never going to be it, so really the only thing left that I knew which was in my life was sport so I took that up and straight away I was quite successful so it led onto bigger things, and I’ve always loved cycling so it’s great to be good at it. Initially the passion came from just wanting to be better than everyone else.
You were run over by a hit and run driver, were you worried about your future in the sport?
Initially I suffered temporary paralysis from the waist down so that was very scary for a cyclist to go through. At the time I was only six months from the commonwealth games and I was on my way to the Manchester velodrome so it was really hard to get it to sink in and it didn’t sink in until about five days after the accident as I refused to believe it had happened.
My first concern was that the commonwealth games were only a few weeks away and it was only after 12 days when I tried to start to walk again and try to sit up in bed that I realised I wasn’t going to walk out of the hospital and I wasn’t going to jump on a bike two weeks later and then my whole concern then turned into thinking that this is for the rest of my life, can cycling really has to take a back seat I cant think “I need to be back on the bike” so it didn’t bother me at that time and it’s only very slowly that I’ve been able to accept what happened, so it’s been a very long road.
What made you so determined to compete again when so many other would have thrown in the towel?
I’m not a quitter and the guy who hit me, a guy called Stephen Craig, in my eyes he took away from me six months of my life where I was in a spinal jacket living at my parents house and having to have people do absolutely everything for me and being on caffeta and drips, he took all that time away from me and changed me mentally and physically for the rest of my life and I refuse to let him take the one thing I love doing [racing a bike] away from me.
How did you regain your previous levels of fitness and how long did it take?
It’s taken ever since the accident and I’m still trying to regain the level of fitness I had before the accident and I’ll never get back to the levels I was then, it’s been two and a half years since it happened and I just need to be happy at the level that I am at and take on more challenges because racing at the level I was before [Olympic and Commonwealth] is never going to happen so now I’m looking for more and more challenges these days, which is why I’m doing the London - Paris ride.
Is this your first major challenge since the accident?
Yes, this is my first real challenge so I expect it will be quite interesting. It is a 200km a day ride and I am a little bit nervous with anticipation, I want to see how I go once I get going. I think I will be completely different by the time I get to Paris though, I will either be going; “Woo! This is fantastic!” or “Oh my god, why the hell did I do that?”
Can you tell me more about the London to Paris race?
I became interested in it because it’s a completely unique event and classes itself as the professional event for amateurs and basically it is a small group of about 300 people riding from London to Paris and I really like the ethos of it, which is that it enables all these everyday cyclists to come along and be treated like professionals and start in an amazing setting at Hampton Court and finish at the Eiffel Tower in Paris.
There are also great sponsors such as vitamin water, adidas and Subaru who are getting involved, which makes it a really amazing opportunity and which differentiates this from the ‘Pay your ten quid and ride around the park’ type of event, so that’s why I got involved, and I met the organiser and then everything snowballed from there.
You have set up the charity Emma’s Spinal Hope, tell me a bit about it.
It was set up in November 2005 and it stems from the idea that when I was taken into Hope Hospital in Salford, which is a NHS hospital with a spinal unit and I was astounded by the level of service which I was given, it was absolutely amazing and the nursing staff were great.
The NHS get such bad press but it’s not their fault, they are so under funded and they are so short of funds that they do their best with the funds they have and when people say things like “The NHS are crap” it’s really not their fault and it is an unfair criticism of them. There is one single pot of money and so many departments are fighting over it so what we did was set up Emma’s Spinal Hope to raise money to fund research into spinal injuries in Hope Hospital itself because that hospital is one of the North West’s leading teaching hospital for spinal and neurological science and it’s an amazing centre.
Because of all the hospital politics we arranged with the neurosurgeon who runs the research department that he would tell us what he needed to raise money for which the NHS couldn’t provide. The NHS have a policy where certain equipment and certain research facilities they will not fund unless they have a dual purpose so certainly for spinal injuries there are certain things they cannot get, so the neurosurgeon will inform us of how much money he needs to raise and then we go out and raise money and the pot of money sits there until he needs it.
We raise money by doing things such as charity balls and selling wristbands and we’re trying to come up with new ideas all the time and we’d like people to start doing marathons for us and using us as a charity but it’s very specialised and is only for Hope Hospital and the spinal research there, but if we can only help one person’s lifestyle then that’s great for us.
The London to Paris cycle tour is sponsored by Vitamin water, can you explain what that is?
Basically what it say’s on the bottle; it’s a vitamin enriched water which comes in 15 flavours but there are only six released in the UK and each one has certain vitamins packed into it, for example one has vitamin C and one has potassium in it. There are loads of different types, all with their own very unique flavour to give people with the current hectic lifestyles, where we’re running in and out of offices, the time to have their vitamins and minerals and as people are forgetting to take vitamins, this hopes to give hydration and vitamins on the go.
It has taken off massively in America and has just been launched in the South of England, but they are hoping to bring it into small businesses and certain retail outlets all over the UK which fit with the ethos of the product because when it started out the was just one man going into independent retailers and selling his products and he wants to keep it as an exclusive product.
What are your plans for the future?
My plans are to stay out of hospital and to just be happy. I don’t know what my future holds and I’m just living day by day and week by week and just seeing what happens, At the moment I have loads of really good opportunities so we’ll just wait and see, but without a doubt, they will always involve cycling
Female First - Ruth Harrison