A 57-year-old triathlete is lucky to be alive after hitting a pothole downtown Montreal; the same pothole a woman hit and was left in a coma as a result of the crash. Anik de St-Hilaire left her job at Concordia University on Aug. 12 and was biking to Parc Jean-Drapeau to do some laps in the pool when she crashed on Guy Street, flew over her handlebars and hit the pavement face-first. “So I was going down, and I slowed down a little bit because I remember, last year when I had the accident, but I didn’t fall that time,” she said. “Unfortunately, this time going down with, there’s a bump, plus the crack... I fell really on my face, you know, directly like that.” A Hydro-Quebec worker nearby rushed up to de St-Hilaire and told her she was the second person that day who fell from their bike at the same location. Massage therapist Melanie Guindon suffered severe head trauma when she hit the same pothole and wound up in a coma. De St-Hilaire thought she was okay after her crash, but the worker had a different opinion. “He was looking at me, and I saw in his face that he was looking at my face, and I said, Okay, there’s something there,” said de St-Hilaire. When she checked on her injuries in her phone, she realized that she needed to wait for an ambulance. “They scanned everything, and the doctor at the emergency said, ‘You’re so lucky, because you should be made of cartilage because nothing is broken,” she said. “He said you should have broke yourself, you know, in multiple pieces, that you’re so lucky.” When de St-Hilaire saw the story about Guindon’s accident, it sent chills down her spine. “There’s something going on there, and the City of Montreal should do something because when you’re taking the cycle path, you expect, as a cyclist, to be secure in that zone,” she said. De St-Hilaire has made a full recovery and completed a triathlon last weekend. The pothole in question has since been filled.
