April, 2024. Lennard Kämna is training in Tenerife. It’s a month before the Giro d’Italia, where the German is set to be Bora-hansgrohe’s co-leader alongside Dani Martínez. For the second year in a row, he’s parking his stage hunting ambitions for an attempt at the general classification. “I was in really good shape and on track for the Giro, my big goal,” he says. As he goes out training every morning on the Spanish island, he tells himself to be careful. “In my head and in my mind, I’m saying: ‘don’t take too much risk when descending’. If I go hard now and have a crash, it won’t help me.” He doesn’t usually caution himself.

On Wednesday, April 3, he’s descending when a car veers into his path and knocks him off his bike. He’s transferred to hospital and placed in intensive care. Those thoughts he had turned out to be cruelly prescient. “I was really thinking about it [crashing] and then it actually happened. It was really weird.” His injury list is long: multiple broken ribs, a fractured shoulder blade and scapula, severe chest trauma, and lung contusion. 

Fortunately, his condition improves and after three days he’s moved out of ICU. “I was always conscious, but I only have about 10 minutes of memory of my three days in the emergency room,” Kämna, 27, tells Rouleur and international press in late January. “I didn’t know why I was in hospital, and it was like: woah, all of a sudden I’m here, but why? It took me a long time to realise what happened and that it wasn’t a dream but reality.”

He slowly comes round, but processing the accident takes time. “When I heard what happened, I was quite emotional. I didn’t know how dramatic it was and I thought maybe the Giro might not be possible, but afterwards I could maybe be fit for this or that event. I couldn’t get in my mind how bad the injury was.” It’s so disruptive that when Kämna makes his debut for Lidl-Trek on March 24 at Volta a Catalunya, it will be one year and two weeks since he last raced. 

This article was published by Rouleur in March 2025. To read the full article click here.