Every sportsperson at the top of their field has had days of outstanding personal achievement and, conversely, times when they wish they were somewhere else entirely.
We caught up with UCI World Cup 2010 Mountainbike Downhill champion Gee Atherton to find out his recollections on the highs and lows of being one of the best in the business...
An unprecedented Atherton clean sweep
The best day for me was a World Cup race in Andorra in 2008. It was a three-stage World Cup race, so you've got the downhill and 4-cross elements to it. Dan came down in the 4-cross on the Saturday evening and managed to win that, which was his first World Cup win, then Rach won the women's on the Sunday and I won the men's downhill on the Sunday afternoon, so we managed to get a triple win that weekend, which was awesome. That was the first time that's happened and it hasn't happened since, so that was probably the best day for me.
'We managed to get a triple win, which was awesome'
Disaster strikes for Dan
My worst day? That would probably be the day that my brother Dan broke his neck. That stands out as the worst day for me just because of the way that it happened. We were riding the dirt jumps and he crashes and hurts himself. At the time I was thinking it wasn't serious and then he's saying it's quite bad and that he needed an ambulance and it just got worse and worse. The more we found out about it over the next 24 hours, the news got worse and worse to the point where the surgeon was saying that Dan only just survived it and he came that close to dying, so that has been the worst day for me so far.
Watch Gee in action in the latest episode of The Atherton Project here
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