Italian rider Claudi Cretti is back riding a bike just four months after being placed in an induced coma following a high-speed crash at the Giro Rosa.
Cretti crashed into a road-side guardrail at around 90kmh on a descent on stage seven of the Giro Rosa, being airlifted to hospital where doctors placed her in a medically-induced coma.
Despite initially being in a critical condition, Cretti regained consciousness within two weeks, was transferred to a hospital in her hometown within a month, and is now back on a bike for the first time.
A photo posted on Facebook by her mother Laura Bianchi shows Cretti in her Valcar-PBM kit aboard her Colnago bike, together with the caption "What now? Who's gonna stop us?".
Italian broadcaster Rai also showed a video of Cretti, still with short hair from her time undergoing treatment in hospital, going for a ride on a hybrid bike with her brother Giacomo.
"She’d been waiting for months to ride a bike and now she’s done it. It was the first time since July that I’ve seen her smile like that," he said.
Cretti's recovery has previously been described by her mother as "a new adventure" with no word yet on whether she could return to racing at some point in the future.
In her third year riding for a UCI team, Cretti had enjoyed steady success through the first half of the 2017 season, including sprinting to eighth place on stage four of the Giro Rosa just three days before he crash.
The result was her first top-10 finish in a Women's WorldTour race, although she had previously finished fifth in the youth classification in the prestigious Emakumeen Euskal Bira race in 2016.
