At the Games of the Small States of Europe in San Marino 2001, during the road race after around six laps of 12, the Liechtenstein team car tried to overtake us. While overtaking, the car brushed against me and although the knock wasn’t very hard, it was enough for me to fall on the road. I fell on my back and I felt a sharp pain.

I remained immobile not daring to move, because I was worried that I had suffered some serious injury. Immediately the ambulance arrived and they checked whether I had any broken bones, especially my neck and back.

A stretcher was brought out to take me to hospital, but in the meantime I realised that I had no broken bones and I could move and stand up.

I did stand up and told them that I wanted to continue the race. The doctor disagreed with my decision, so I asked my coach to bring over my bike and I checked that there was no damage to it and adjusted the brake levers because they were twisted.

I mounted the bike and continued the race. On the first climb I tried to shift to a lower gear, but suddenly I realised that the gears were not working, and I was stuck with high gears only (this is like trying to climb a hill on a car with top gears instead of first gear).

I did eventually finish the race out of pure determination to catch up and in fact did manage to overtake some cyclists that were in front of me.

I did the last 60km in a lot of pain and with the wrong gears. Although I did my best it wasn’t enough to recover the time I had lost during the fall and as a result the team did not manage to get a medal.

This was an unfortunate and unlucky incident prior to which we were doing so well; it was this factor that made me determined to not let the team down, to rise to the occasion and fight it out for Malta, even at the risk of doing further injury to myself. I was so determined to continue I didn’t think of it at the time.

Looking back I realise that, that was real determination and an athlete with no determination will never succeed.