‘If I don’t need legs to walk, then maybe you don’t need wings to fly.’

It’s a line that hits you first as poetry, and then as fact. Because for Andrea Foppoli, there’s no self-pity or cinematic grief in his refusal to dramatise what most of us would call life changing. There’s just the quiet logic of someone who refuses to be still.

In August 2023, Andrea collided with a delivery van making a sudden U-turn on one of the roads here in Northern Italy that he knows so well. “‘I lifted up my arms and entered like a rod,” he recalls. “I remember I tensed every muscle in my body.” The impact shattered a vertebra and left him paralysed from the waist down.

He never lost consciousness. “I remember being on the ground and trying to get back up, but I couldn’t,’ In a split second, this mountain lover's world had been rearranged.

What came next was emergency surgery, then months of rehab – a process that would have flattened most people. The prognosis was clear, it could be years before he would regain his independence. But Andrea had other ideas. “I remember the staff in hospital telling me I’d be celebrating Christmas and Easter with them. That was not my plan.” And it wasn’t.

Two and a half months later, he was out. Four months after that, back at work. Six months in, he was riding an adaptive mountain bike. By the end of 2024, he was living alone again.

Each small, deliberate step – decisions made one after another – delivered with the same calm tone he uses for everything – pragmatic, unshaken. “Looking back, each week felt like a new finish line, but I wasn’t deliberately chasing milestones and it didn’t even realise it at the time.” But with each achievement, he pulled himself back further into the life he knew. It kept going, the weights got heavier, the pain got less, and he could spend more time on the indoor trainer.

That’s the thread running through his life: movement. Today, he trains with the motivation, precision (and, yes, the power numbers) of a professional purely so that he can ride with friends on his adaptive MTB. In the gym, on Zwift, on alpine climbs, his numbers wouldn’t look out of place in a training camp spreadsheet. ‘I’ve always been a little bit goal-oriented, although I’m not the type to enter races. It’s been the same with my recovery – I just want to remove as many limitations in my life as I can and show that it can be done. I could choose to live with my parents, stop working, stay on the couch and watch sports. But I feel most alive when my heart is beating at a thousand beats per minute and I’m struggling to breath,” Andrea continues.

And when you ride with him, that aliveness is contagious. The pace is relentless, the optimism disarming. He chooses routes that fit his 75kg Bowhead bike – big climbs, high alpine, wider trails – and take him to amazing places, easily wearing the battery out with 70km and over 2,000 metres of vertical. The feeling is freedom. In these moments, you forget the mechanics of it and everyone’s just moving and making an effort together. His friends sharing in this experience.

He doesn’t dwell on the crash. “I don’t get angry thinking back to the accident,” he says. “I’ve come out of it pretty well. Even though not one part of my life is the same, I can still find the same emotions from sport – just in a different form. I want people in a similar situation to know that everything can return to what they were. It might just look different.”

Maybe that’s the quiet power of Andrea’s story. His resilience isn’t loud. It’s not a campaign or a comeback narrative. It’s just life, determined, adapted and continued.

Flight, it turns out, doesn’t always need wings.