Wiggle-High5 rider Macey Stewart has posted an emotional plea to "impatient drivers" after she suffered a close pass while out on a training ride on Monday.
Visibly upset after suffering the close pass, Stewart took the video at the side of the road before posting it to Instagram with the caption "Clearly very emotional after ANOTHER close call today... People, WAKE UP & have a think about how your impatience can ruin someone’s life."
In the video, Stewart describes how the repeated close passes that she suffers while training is not only stopping her enjoying her riding, but making her actively frightened about going out and doing her job.
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She also called on drivers to consider how they would feel if someone close to them was involved in a collision due to a driver's impatience.
"This video is for the idiot drivers who don't have 10 seconds to wait behind a rider - you are forcing me to hate my sport and not want to continue to chase my dreams because I am so frightened just to do my job and go out training.
"How would you feel if your child or friend got hit because of someone who couldn't wait 10 seconds?"
Stewart is far from the only professional rider to be left shaken by close passes during training rides, with British professional Alex Dowsett also opening up about a scary near-miss that left him in tears.
Writing in December, Dowsett described how he was nearly involved in a head-on collision with a driver who had moved onto the wrong side of the road to overtake another vehicle, saying that that incident was "the closest I’ve ever been to a career or life-ending crash and it’s scared the living daylights out of me, made me question why we do what we do and if the consequences are worth it."
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As for Stewart, she is still on the comeback trail from a bad crash at the Tour Down Under in which she suffered a collapsed eye socket, describing how her "eye was held in place with a metal plate". and also has bad experiences from training on the roads after being involved in a hit-and-run in 2014.
She was unable to ride her bike for two months following the crash in January, but is now back training and on the road to recovery.
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