The young Tour de France winner who broke “almost 20” bones when he crashed into a bus on a motorway has said “I’m back” from his hospital bed following successful spine surgery.

Egan Bernal, 25, of Bogota, Colombia, crashed at high speed into a stationary bus on a highway during its trajectory through the Colombian municipality of Gachancipa on Monday, 24th January.

He enumerated his injuries in a message to his 1.3 million Instagram followers on Thursday, 4th February: “Almost 20 broken bones: eleven ribs, femur, kneecap, fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae, odontoids, metacarpal, a thumb, a knocked-out tooth, both lungs perforated.”

Bernal, who is seen in this photo looking upbeat while in a neck brace and lying in his bed at the University Clinic of La Sabana de Chia, added: “I almost died, but you know what? I’m grateful to God for giving me this test. It’s been the hardest race, but I’ve had an excellent group of people around me.

“Yesterday I underwent my last major operation and it seems everything went well.

“So now to recover and do this. I’m back. And let’s rock!”

Bernal’s latest operation set out to achieve “biomechanical stability of the cervical spine”. The op yielded “excellent clinical results” and was accomplished “without complications”.

It followed several other successful operations, some of them major, with the young cyclist now strong enough to start his recovery to get back on a bike.

Bernal, who won the won the Tour de France in 2019, becoming the first Latin American rider to do so and the youngest winner in over a century, had previously revealed he had been given a “95 percent chance of becoming paraplegic” and had “almost lost his life” in the crash.

His latest major win came at the 2021 Giro d’Italia.