Callum Russell watched his hands, not his legs, as he gripped the handcycle for the very first time — and he hated it. It felt nothing like the mountain bike he'd loved, the one he'd once raced for a living. He told himself he'd never do it again. Yet six years later, in 2025, he became the first British man to win a World Championship medal in handcycling, a sport where riders power three wheels with their arms.
The story starts in 2018, on a practice run at Gisburn Forest in northern England. Russell, then 24, had just signed a new sponsor and knew every twist of the course. But he misjudged a jump. As he crashed to the ground, he couldn't feel his legs, and when he was airlifted to hospital he learned he had severed his spine at T11 and was paralysed from the waist down. He would need a wheelchair full-time and would have to relearn even basic things like bladder and bowel control.
What's remarkable is what he says happened next: he never had a breakdown. "I genuinely didn't have that moment of trauma," he remembers. "There was the realisation that it's going to be hard, I'm going to have to relearn things, but that's what we're moving on to." Within weeks, with family and friends around him, his first instinct was to get back outdoors.
Sport came back into his life through an unexpected door. Instead of cycling, he tried rowing — something he'd never done before — and quickly reached Great Britain's Para-rowing squad, winning a bronze on his international debut at a World Cup in 2022. But during a training camp, he watched his team-mate Ben Pritchard, a Paralympic and world champion, handcycle around a lake after practice. That spark rekindled his love of pedalling.
Russell switched to handcycling in 2023, and in 2025 took bronze in the time trial at the World Championships in Belgium — history for British men in the sport. Now 30, from Stockport, he returns to the World Championships in Alabama this weekend as one of Great Britain's medal hopes. Alongside his UK Sport-funded cycling career, he also models, signed to a talent agency after showing up to a casting on a whim, appearing in TV adverts for well-known brands.
Before his injury, Russell says, he was the reserved one who watched from the sidelines and thought opportunities "aren't for me." Now his question is different: "Why is that not for me?" He puts it plainly: "I think that there is definitely an amazing life after injury. It will change your life, and there are huge learning curves, but there's also massive amounts of opportunities that maybe you wouldn't have before that injury, so it's definitely worth grabbing them with both hands and going for it." For Russell, the crash wasn't the end of his story — it was the moment he decided to write a new one.