The long road back

Former Italian pro cyclist Marco Rullo – now living in Lake Oswego – finds renewed strength as he makes his return to the pro circuit

By Cliff Newell

The Lake Oswego Review, Oct 15, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Lake Oswego cyclists riders might see Rullo as he easily cruises up one of the steeper hills in town.

VERN UYETAKE / lake oswego review

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Lake Oswego has many bicycle riders going up and down and all around the hills, curves and greenery of the country.

But it is safe to say there is no other bicyclist in town like Marco Rullo.

If you look closely, Rullo is built for total physical efficiency at 5-10 and 140 pounds, a practically zero percent body fat type of guy. He is also well illustrated with plentiful tattoos.

Then there is his riding outfit. It doesn’t look like something he pulled off the rack at a really cool bike gear store. It looks like the genuine article for a professional bicycle racer.

This is because that is exactly what Marco Rullo is.

But the most unique thing about Rullo is that he is launching a comeback to regain his place as a top pro cyclist, two years after a horrific accident in a race threatened to end his career.

And the Italian native is doing it from his adopted home in Lake Oswego. He can’t find enough good things to say about it.

“It’s like New York City, with the neighborhoods and culture,” Rullo said. “It’s so pretty and has so many nice people. I liked the way all the people came out for the Fourth of July parade and the car show in the park. Mostly, the people in the U.S. keep to themselves.

“Lake Oswego is very family oriented. It has an infectious spirit about it that makes me feel very comfortable.”

Rullo even thinks Lake Oswego has great Italian food.

Yet he has good reason for his remarkably upbeat frame of mind lately because he is close to rejoining the ranks of top professional team bicycle racers. It has been a long two years since his terrible accident in 2007 at the Mount Hood Cycling Classic.

One minute it seemed he was well on his way to winning the race. The next his right leg was shredded and his future seemed to vanish.

“I really wanted to win that day,” Rullo said. “It was important to me. It was June 2, which is like the Italian Fourth of July, our day of independence. It was the middle of the race and I was attacking on the downhill, trying to take the lead.

“A guy got tired and crashed right in front of me. I was going 45 miles an hour and there was nothing I could do to avoid him. I flipped over my handlebars and went straight into the ground.”

A veteran of eight years on the world professional bike racing circuit, Rullo had a few crashes in his career, but nothing close to what happened to him on Mount Hood. His leg was “hanging like it was nothing” and he lost half of his blood. He nearly died. Rullo was informed by trauma orthopedists that it was the worst cycling-related femoral fracture they had ever seen.

The crash was followed by four weeks in a hospital, four operations and two months using a wheelchair and crutches. Today he has a foot-long scar and nine bolts holding together a leg that was shattered in four places.

“You get used to the risks,” Rullo said. “You wreck two or three times, and maybe you break something or maybe you don’t. But you get up and keep riding. You very rarely have a serious injury like this that can end your career.

“My muscles were destroyed as the leg flopped around. There was so much fluid the doctors couldn’t operate for a week.”

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