‘I still miss that swimsuit’: Bridie O’Donnell on the item she most regrets losing | Life and style

Bridy O’Donnell has enjoyed two very different careers. First, she worked as a practitioner. Then, in his mid-thirties, O’Donnell made a sharp pivot to professional cycling. She has had great success in this area. She has traveled the world for six years with the Australian national team and the Italian professional team.

O’Donnell eventually switched to working full-time in medicine, but she never actually left the world of sports. In 2016, at the age of 42, she broke the women’s world record for the longest distance covered by a bicycle in an hour. In 2018, O’Donnell published Life and Death, a memoir detailing her experience as a cyclist in Europe. This year, Australia’s most unique slash will rejoin the Tour de France SBS commentary team at the opening of the Tour de France on Saturday, June 26th.

Her many years of traveling as a cyclist have taught O’Donnell a lot, including the importance of a good night’s sleep. Here she tells us the story of the pillow that made her many cheap motels bearable and two other important belongings.

What to save from home in a fire

I’ll grab a gypsy, my rescue greyhound, and some family heirs that may be of little value to others but of great sentimental value to me. One of them is a beautiful gold pendant necklace with a small glass and a gold medal. The medal was awarded to my great-grandmother, who won the Irish bag piping contest when she was a teenager, and she had it every day.

Decades later, my grandfather decided to propose to his grandmother and asked his future mother-in-law for a medal. Instead of a ring, he had a necklace made for the proposal. They married in the 1940s and had six children and eight grandchildren. When I graduated from medical school, my grandmother gave me a medal and a necklace and kept them safe for 20 years.

My most useful object

My most useful object is arguably my pillow. The only thing I discovered when I was a professional cyclist and was comfortable while being crushed behind a team van during a 14-hour long road trip for a bike race from central Italy to northern Spain. I realized it was a way. It also saved me when I arrived at a 2.5 star motel with terrible pillows. It inevitably led to a terrible sleep.

Bridy O’Donnell in full cycling mode in the United States in 2012. Photo: Shirono Coulter

I was scared because there were many team vans without seat belts in the back seats. My concern about it was the ridicule of an Italian man who smoked a chain, driving a van and saying that the seatbelts were “invented by the British and a waste of time.”

The item I regret the most after losing

I once owned a very stylish black one-piece swimsuit with a wide open chest. When I wore it, I imagined it was like a hybrid of Bond’s villain and Hitchcock’s heroine Sophia Loren. I bought it during my vacation in Antibes, France, and I felt a very European-style moncheri.

One year when I headed to Italy to join a professional team, I was stupid enough to pack it in a suitcase of clothes that didn’t bother me, and of course the luggage didn’t arrive at Milan’s Malpensa Airport It was. When the team mechanic headed to the airport for some reason, I returned to the lost baggage section every week, but it never appeared. I still miss the swimsuit.

‘I still miss that swimsuit’: Bridie O’Donnell on the item she most regrets losing | Life and style Source link ‘I still miss that swimsuit’: Bridie O’Donnell on the item she most regrets losing | Life and style

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