He had crashed his mountain bike during a routine training ride on the Port Hills.
Hickling walked away from it, but that afternoon went to hospital and had a CT scan which revealed the damage – he had fractured and dislocated his neck.
He spent a night waiting for a spot to open up to undergo surgery, and two nights recovering from the procedure.
“Looking at the x-rays, it was very close,” he said.
“I dodged a bullet there because I was pretty close to either being paralysed or dead, so can’t really complain about still being able to walk.”
Now, the 18-year-old Avon rower has earned his first national selection, named in the squad to compete in the eight at the U19 world championships in Canada in August.
“It’s super cool, like, pretty amazing,” he said.
“I definitely wasn’t really expecting it, didn’t really have any expectations on myself obviously just because of what’s happened. But, yeah, I managed to get selected, super stoked with it.”
Hickling said he’d received a message of support from Rowing New Zealand in the early days of his recovery.
“I got an email about a week after my injury and they said, ‘look, we’ve heard about your injury, we still think you’ll be in the running for the national team this year, so just don’t put that to rest.’
“I was pretty determined just to kind of get back to my original fitness, heaps of biking each day once I was able to, after about six weeks I was able to start running again.
“Heaps of exercise to keep fit and then managed to get back in the boat about three weeks before the New Zealand club national champs and kind of just went from there.”
After 10 weeks out of action, Hickling was back training with Avon in late January.
“I lost a little bit of weight, just upper body strength and stuff like that, but it’s all come back on pretty quickly,” he said.
“Avon was doing a camp down in Twizel, so I kind of tagged along to that. I was super, super excited to get back in the boat and getting back with my mates was awesome fun as well.”
His focus now is on preparing for the world champs after impressing at the trials last week.
“We’re on a bit of a post-trial break at the moment and I’m already starting to get bored.
“We’ll kick off Christchurch-based training next Monday, and then we’ve got about seven weeks until the whole crew assembles up at Karapiro for a six-week camp, and then I’m over to Canada.”
After the regatta Hickling will head to Boston – he’s been offered a rowing scholarship at Northeastern University, starting in September.
“I was talking to a few schools, went over for a few visits, but kind of really clicked with the coaches at Northeastern.
“I managed to be lucky enough to be offered a full ride scholarship there, so accepted that when they sent that out, so it should be good fun.”
