Having cracked three vertebrae, damaging four more and bruising a lung almost exactly a year earlier during the Tour of Hainan, Hill would have been forgiven for fearing the worst and calling for assistance. But that's not in his DNA.

It was stage six of the Tour of Taihu Lake, the penultimate 116-kilometre stage. Hill had not been trying to get involved in the often dangerous sprint finishes, preparing himself instead for the Japan Cup only a week later.

But he found himself in the mix as the finish loomed large and his competitive instincts took over.

Battling with another rider into the last corner, Hill was forced wide and he crashed into a concrete wall. The wall ended abruptly, hurling him into a bollard which threw him into the air. He landed on his back with his race radio pressed directly into his spine.

"I’m still thinking, 'I’ve got to get up, I’ve got to finish', because if you don’t finish you can’t start the next stage and there was one more stage to go," Hill said.

"I was trying to put my chain back on but my back was so sore I couldn’t bend over to do it.

"So I flicked my chain back onto the bike with my foot and got going again. I felt very weak but gingerly rolled the last 500 metres across the finish line.

"I rode into the finish and got off and about 10 minutes later the pain really hit me."

After an ambulance ride to hospital, scans revealed three fractures to his transverse processes, the points of the spine which connect to muscles and ligaments.

While Hill puts his determination to finish down to a rider's mentality, his career has been defined by an unbridled determination to keep going in the face of great challenges.

To put it simply, almost everything that could have gone wrong in his cycling career has gone wrong.

Hill starting cycling relatively late at age 17 in his hometown of Scone. He progressed quickly and secured deals with a number of Australia's most competitive teams.

At 23 he signed with Hincapie Development Team, where Cadel Evans' former world tour team BMC often looked for new riders. But before he could even get in the saddle he was slapped with a two-year doping ban.

Hill has maintained that he accidentally consumed a banned substance, a common pre-workout powder, given to him by a teammate. And even though he turned himself in to the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority as soon as he'd discovered his mistake, he was still hit with the maximum penalty.

"That was the worst period of my life [during the ban] and I struggled with it a lot," Hill said.

"I moved back home and just sat on my parents couch doing nothing.

"I felt empty because all I wanted to do was ride.

"I was trying to think about a life without the bike and nothing satisfied what I wanted to do, nothing compared to cycling, so I just did nothing."

Hill credits watching Fabian Cancellara win the Flanders Roubaix double, two of the world's biggest cycling races, as his inspiration to begin training again during his ban.

World tour teams typically look to sign riders aged around 23 or 24 and Hill concedes he will always wonder about what could have been had the doping ban not taken away his opportunity to crack the sport's elite.

Rather than a fairytale comeback, Hill's career has been dogged by bad luck; the two back breaks, a broken collarbone, a team folding immediately after promising him a contract, mechanical faults at crucial junctures and enough gravel rash that he's lost count of the times he's woken to blood-stained bed sheets.

"I don’t believe in karma because I don’t believe I’ve done so many bad things in my life to deserve this bad luck," Hill said.

"Maybe I’ll win the lotto one day and it’ll all change.

"They say you make your own luck, I must just be very bad at making it."

It hasn't been all doom and gloom. In 2016, Hill won the points jersey at Victoria's Herald Sun Tour, sharing a podium with four-time Tour de France champion Chris Froome. A year later, when cycling commentators doubted his climbing ability, he returned to Victoria to claim the king of the mountain jersey. Along the way, he's claimed victories throughout Asia and at home.

The life of a professional cyclist, particularly one not competing at the world tour level, is varied and Hill has not been immune to the challenges of that life.

He has worked at various times as a swimming instructor, baker, landscaper and delivered pamphlets to supplement his cycling career. He has had months on end apart from his fiancée, two-time track cycling world champion Rebecca Wiasak, as they both chased their own career goals.

Asked whether it's worth all the difficulties, he answers without hesitation.

"I couldn’t imagine bike riding not being a part of my life. It’s what I think about most of the time," Hill said.

"A lot of other riders get to the end of the season and they have a month off the bike, and it’s not necessarily that they’re so physically tired from the season but mentally tired and they need to do something else for a while and forget about it.

"But I try to forget about it and think about other things and I just see the beautiful weather and I just want to be out on the bike."

Hill is hoping to return to his Slovenian-based team Ljubljana Gusto Xaurum in 2019. His goal is to add a European tour win to his resume.

As he left this interview, Hill spotted two four leaf clovers and quickly picked them; hopefully a sign his luck might be about to change.