In August 2023 Matt Dinham had his breakthrough ride. Very few had ever heard of him, but he finished seventh at the elite World Championships road race on debut aged 23. His employers dsm firmenich (now Picnic PostNL) were so impressed that they rewarded him with a contract extension to tie him down until 2027. The future was promising, full of potential waiting to be tapped into.
On Sunday (September 28), Dinham wasn’t at the 2025 Worlds in Kigali, Rwanda; he was starting the Tour of Langkawi in Malaysia. It’s his first race all season. In fact, he hasn’t finished a race since the 2023 Il Lombardia, 722 days ago. Dinham’s career has been suspended in purgatory for two whole seasons, an innocuous injury derailing his progression, slamming him into what has seemed like permanent standby mode. Many times, he wondered out loud if his young career was over for good. “I don’t know what I did to deserve all of this – I’ve been pretty lost the whole time,” the 25-year-old tells Rouleur by video call from his home in Nice, a week before Langkawi begins. This is Dinham’s story of anguish, frustration and finally relief at pinning a race number on once again.
Promising beginnings
A quick biography: born in Johannesburg, South Africa, Dinham started racing mountain bikes and BMX at the age of 4. Aged 11, he and his family moved to Sydney, Australia, where he continued with the aforementioned disciplines and added road cycling to his repertoire. In 2017, he switched nationalities to Australian, and though road was increasingly becoming a bigger focus, mountain bike cross country was still his main jam. “I was ranked second in the world going into the 2019 Junior Worlds,” he remembers. In 2021, racing his second of three seasons with the Australian Continental team BridgeLane, he took a leap of faith and boarded a flight to Europe to advance his road career. “It was Covid, and the manager said: ‘You can sign a waiver with the government to get you out of the country and to Europe, but we can’t guarantee your flights back’.” Dinham – who describes himself “not as a pure climber, but someone suited to the Ardennes and one-week races” – was rewarded for making the jump. “I finished 11th at the Tour de l’Avenir, eighth on GC at Tour of Bretagne, and that’s when it all kickstarted for me.”
That, and seventh at the 2023 Worlds, of course. Not forgetting, too, his Tour de France debut as a neo-pro and his sixth on GC at the Arctic Tour of Norway that bookended that ride in Glasgow. “I was there to support Bling [Michael Matthews] and Kaden [Groves] and wasn’t expecting to finish the day,” he remembers of the 2023 Super Worlds, “but I got lucky when the break went and when we got caught by the main bunch I hung on. I knew on a good day I could race with the best and that day proved it.”
And then it all went wrong. Very wrong. Just no one knew how, why, or even where exactly it had gone wrong. Dinham thinks he knows the source of the mystery. “After the season finished, dsm took us all to Austria for a mini boot camp as a team. It was a pretty awesome weekend, the highlight being an 18km hike in the mountains.” From there, Dinham flew home to Sydney. “My feet were a bit sore from all the walking because as a cyclist I’m not used to walking those distances, but I didn’t think much of it. When I got off the plane, I twisted my left ankle slightly. Again, I didn’t think anything of it. Within 10 to 15 minutes, though, I couldn’t walk. I don’t know what happened but my life changed pretty quickly from that point. It was surreal.”
Dinham was at the front of the Glasgow Worlds in 2023. Image by: Zac Williams/SWPix.com.
Scans after scans
In Sydney, Dinham sought the advice of various medical professionals. This would become a recurring theme in the next two years – knocking on one doctor’s door after the next. The first one told him he had a sprained tendon. “I got a little bit better after resting before returning to training,” he recalls, but the pain returned when he did a 20 minute fitness test at dsm’s December camp. “I couldn’t walk afterwards,” he remembers.
Back he went to Australia for more scans. This time he was told he had an eight millimetre stress fracture in his left heel. “So I’d gone through half the heel bone, basically,” he points out. That diagnosis perplexed him. “It was so confusing as I hadn’t done anything. The doctors said they couldn’t explain it.” Nevertheless, he spent eight weeks in a protective boot, and returned to Europe with the 2024 Giro d'Italia a big goal. He remained on one crutch until the end of March 2024, when scans showed that the bone had healed. He was deemed fit enough to start both La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, but didn't finish either of them. They were his only races of 2024. “I went there to do some turns, but it was literally signing on, rolling out and then pulling out.” Despite his best hopes, he was definitely not fixed.
Further tests were done post-Ardennes, and this time he was told he had a partial injury of the talofibular ligament and a partial rupture of the posterior tibialis tendon. Again, confusion. “How?” he asks. “I’d been on crutches for 16 weeks. How could I have ruptured my ligaments?” Another month of hobbling around on crutches followed, but progression was limited, characterised by frequent setbacks. “I could only really walk for five minutes and then I would be unable to walk without a severe limp and pain, and it would take another month of rehab to get back to being somewhat mobile again.” He went to see more doctors, beyond exasperated this time. “They told me: your tendons are fine, your bones are healed, there’s no explanation. It was super frustrating.”
Dinham was back in Europe last summer, his search for answers ongoing. He was talking to a vascular specialist in Nice but the language barrier was proving challenging, so back to Australia he went last autumn. “I went for more scans but still they couldn’t find anything.” Something else was also troubling him. “My feet had started tingling at night, and I’d have sharp, shooting pains.” He visited a neurologist in November who prescribed him low level nerve blockers to settle the nerve down. “For a while it worked and it gave me a little bit of hope.” Dinham smiles. Then frowns. “But only for a short period. When I tried to increase the intensity on the bike, it was game over. I was man down again. I couldn’t walk the next day.”
Déjà vu was now firmly set in. Yet more scans were arranged. His total count? Seven MRIs, five ultrasounds, countless x-rays, CTs and bone density scans. “Anything you could imagine,” he says. Outside of the Netherlands – where his team are based – he was paying his own medical bills, too. “It’s cost me a lot of money and has been an expensive process, but I want a career as a pro bike rider and to have a quality of life – two things I wasn’t having.”
At this point, in the first few months of 2025, Dinham was at his lowest. “I was sitting there asking: what is going on? If I did 80 watts on the trainer, after 23 minutes I’d be gritting my teeth in agony. I’d go to dinner with my friends but have to park outside the restaurant as I couldn’t walk for long. I couldn’t live. It was insane.” Watching bike races was the last thing he wanted to do; the FOMO was too strong. “When there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, it’s pretty hard to watch racing.” In an effort to “stop me going stir crazy” he went back to online university, restarting a bachelor’s degree in commerce that he paused in 2022, with plans of majoring in finance. “It gave me something to do,” he said. He’ll finish it in 2027.
Help from an old friend
Dinham's ankle post-surgery. Image provided by Matt Dinham.
In April, one of his former riding buddies, Stuart Grieve, got in touch with him. He was now a professor in radiology and told Dinham to come into his hospital in Sydney for some scans. Grieve, too, was confused by Dinham’s problems, but consulted colleagues, some of whom were also cyclists. “They found that the veins in the tassel tunnel were compressing the tibial nerve on the inside of the ankle. It was an extremely rare injury.” The official diagnosis was Tarsal Tunnel Syndrome. That led to the by now very familiar next step of finding a treatment for it. Three orthopaedic and two vascular surgeons were consulted, and all had doubts about an operation. One said they wouldn’t operate because the increased scar tissue post-surgery would increase nerve compression, but another one said they would. “I risked it, of course,” Dinham says, “but the surgeon went on holiday for a month so again I was left waiting.”
On May 13, Dinham had tarseal tunnel decompression and tibial nerve neurolysis surgery. No operation is guaranteed to be a success, but this one definitely wasn’t: the success rate was predicted at 70/30. “When there’s almost a third of a possibility that it stays the same or gets worse, I knew it meant I might never again be able to walk properly or ride a bike. That was scary.”
Fortunately for Dinham, there is a happy ending to this story: the surgery was a success. “It’s worked,” he smiles. “I had six weeks on crutches post-surgery to get my heel to the ground, and since then it’s been great. The nerve sometimes flares up, but it’ll get better." In mid-August, Dinham left Australia and headed back to Europe, with a racing return finally on the cards. “I saw the surgeon before I left and he was pretty confident it’s fixed now.”
Return to racing
Since returning to Europe, Dinham has been put through his paces by his coach at Picnic PostNL Vincent Villerius. “My training is unconventional, but Vincent has been awesome,” he says. “I can’t do normal three-day blocks when I have to go to the gym every second day.” But progression has definitely been made. “In the last couple of weeks, I’m within 95% of my best 20 minute power and though I’m pretty inconsistent without a big base of training, some days I think I’ve got a glimpse of the form I had at the 2023 Worlds.”
Dinham has been training in Nice ahead of his racing return. Image provided by Matt Dinham.
After two years without racing, Dinham isn’t expecting to be prominent at the Tour of Langkawi, but that doesn’t matter. “Some days I might be lucky to hold onto the gruppetto, but I just can’t wait to be back in the bunch.” Then he goes to the Tour of Guangxi. “Most guys are upset about being sent to China, but I’m stoked – it feels like Christmas!”
A productive winter of training, ideally without any interruptions, will set Dinham’s career back on track. He’s fortunate that he signed a four year deal before his injury – “without that I’d almost certainly be facing unemployment now,” he acknowledges – and is ready to make up for lost time. “I want to hit the ground running at the Tour Down Under, get back to the Ardennes week, and then Grand Tours.” He also feels a duty to repay the faith Picnic had and have in him. “They’ve been great, and have supported me as much as they could have done from such a distance. I’ve been incredibly lucky with that.”
Unlucky is how most people would describe Dinham’s journey. It could have ended much worse, though, if it wasn't for his old riding buddy Grieve. “If I hadn’t known Stuart, and if he hadn’t taken the time to go through all the scans, we would never have found the problem. I owe my career to Stuart, because so often I was lying on the couch thinking, ‘I don't know where I’m going’. I was just dreaming of riding my bike again.” Finally, Dinham is not just riding his bike again, but racing his bike. It’s been two long, long years but light has finally shone at the end of the interminable tunnel.
