Cycling world might never have known African revelation: Kimberley Le Court “had a 10% chance of surviving”

Le Court was born on 23 March 1996 in Curepipe, on Mauritius. In her first years, her family moved to Madagascar. “For one or two years,” she remembers. Things went wrong quickly on the island. “That’s when I contracted malaria,” Le Court begins, describing a period that left a deep mark.

It became a chapter with lasting impact for her family. “It’s something they don’t really talk about,” she explains. “When I was little, we had a camera and everything was filmed. My parents would film me walking down the street and things like that… and they also filmed the moment I got sick.”

In hospital, there was no filming. “But my dad did film my brother waiting outside the hospital, for example. It’s still a story where I don’t know every single detail. If my parents try to talk about it… they just can’t. It makes them too emotional.”

Le Court’s odds, she says, were anything but good. “I only had a ten percent chance of surviving,” she says, visibly fighting emotion. From Madagascar, the family then travelled to France. “That’s where I was taken to a doctor, but in France they didn’t know malaria,” she recalls. “They said it was just the flu, so I was sent home.”

Back at home, she only became sicker. A second doctor’s visit brought the same conclusion, and things continued to worsen. “By the third time, I couldn’t walk anymore. An ambulance came to pick me up because I’d gone into a coma. Only then did they realise I had been in Madagascar — because I’d lived there for one or two years, and then I’d gone to France.”

That finally changed the doctors’ thinking. “Then it clicked and they thought: maybe we should call the doctors in Madagascar to find out more. They only discovered very late that I had malaria, because by then I had only a ten percent chance of surviving.”

A high-risk medication was brought in from Madagascar, and Le Court says her father had to sign a statement acknowledging responsibility for any consequences. “It works for some people, and for others it doesn’t,” she explains. “So we didn’t know if it would take.” At the time, her brother was even called and told he should come to say goodbye.

Fortunately, the treatment worked. “The next morning I woke up on a bike, in the hospital corridor,” Le Court says. “What I remember is that I had an IV in my arm, but I had to keep my arm straight while I was on the bike. The day before, I was almost dead.” A dramatic story — and one that, years later, makes her rise to the top of the sport feel even more remarkable.

All’s well that ends well for Le Court, although she stresses how heavily it affected her family. “It was a really difficult period for my parents and my brother. They remember everything — I was still very young.” Thankfully, it now feels far away. “These days I never get bitten by a mosquito,” the Mauritian rider laughs.