As the surprise winner of the Red Bull Hardline, Ruaridh Cunningham has flown onto the radar of many mountain biking fans in the past week.

To say he’s come from nowhere would be unfair though. Cunningham won the junior downhill World Championships at Fort William way back in 2007 and is now a consistent top 30 finisher in the World Cup series.

On the long, techy Hardline track he came into his own though and left the rest of the competition in his wake – this is especially impressive when you consider he jumped into a tree in practice.

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They breed them tough in Scotland though and that was far from the first crash that Cunningham has had on his rise through the mountain biking ranks – as he show us in this video.

His most impressive scar comes from a plate in his collar bone after he broke it in four pieces, but he’s also had operations on both shoulders, his knee and his hand.

Although time off the bike and physio work can be frustrating, Cunningham believes that the hardest part of recovering from a crash is mentally returning to the same level. It’s tough but as Ruaridh says: “If you’re not crashing you’re not pushing yourself”.