Say what you will about this year’s Tour, it has rarely been dull, if your idea of excitement is watching people fall off for no good reason — clipping spectators, taking headers into ditches, surfing guardrails, you name it.
Poor old Chris Horner came home from the war with a party in his head today after getting caught up in a massive crash with about 25km to go. He rolled in DFL with a carillon playing in his head, and the video was not pretty to watch. As they were prepping him for a hospital visit he was asking if he had finished. Yow.
If Horner starts tomorrow he is either insane, tougher than whang leather or some combination thereof. Meanwhile, RadioShack is down to one functional GC hopeful, Andreas Klöden, sitting fifth at 10 seconds. And VeloNews’ John Wilcockson opines that all the North Americans are fucked, demoted to getting into breaks and chasing stage wins.
Ah, well. So it goes. I don’t have a horse in this race, though I confess to a soft spot for Horner, who seems to enjoy his work so much. Cadel Evans is still second, the soporific Schlecks are both in the top 10, as is teammate Jakob Fuglsang, and Ivan Basso and Super Spaniard are lurking within a minute or two, which is nothing in the mountains. Hell, Horner lost time in double digits on a flat stage.
So, yeah. The nonsense should abate a bit once everyone gets an idea of who the real players are, and the first hint of that comes this weekend, with Saturday’s stage to Super-Besse and Sunday’s slog to St. Flour, where many a pretender will find himself done and dusted.
I’m hoping for a weirdo to pop out of the box. But you know what they say about that — hope in one hand and shit in the other, then see which one fills up faster.
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Yeah… Way scary. I’ve dealt with friends with head injuries and it’s always scary. Chris is insane, not to mention super tough, but a genuine good guy. I don’t expect him to sign in tomorrow morning. That will really suck since he’s been going well this year.
Jeff, my first collarbone involved a blackout and a trip to the ER. Took me a long time to figure out what might have happened (worn cleats, hill sprint, bad get-off). Right up there with waking up at home after a night at the pub and wondering how you got there, and hey, where’s the car, and who’s that on the other side of the bed?
I have been fortunate enough not to have experience a loss of consciousness on a ride. Mine was in the ER after a nasty crash on the track. I was just glad I knew my name and could feel my toes after than one.
I see that Chris didn’t start today. A good call by all involved.
Yes, that video was painful to watch. Frankie was paired with who?? Damn that is either a bikie’s Beavis & Butthead or the dumbest pair of cycling talking heads since, well, forever.
I want the 1:30 I spent trying to get something useful out of it back.
Seriously though it has been a rough road if you are an American chamois sniffer, but maybe this is the karma for those 10 years of TCWSNBN love the French had to suffer through. Just a theory.
James, looks like the link got FUBARed. It should be repaired now. The Innertubes occasionally spring a leak.
No Patrick the link worked fine. I was just wondering why they had Frankie paired with Waldo. But then I realized it was the Buy-cycling magazine website and it all made sense.
About the solution to this is less people on the road. I’m sure that they could make due with two less teams at a minimum. I’m sure that it would be no loss not to have Saur-Sojasun and Vacansoleil-DCM there.
The Tour is one of those experiments in Near Miss Theory. Most of us are oblivious to the near misses we experience every day. But you concentrate them all in one place, and you can’t run from statistics and probability.
You’re buzzing down a road at 90 kph, and you turn on every one of your senses and then a couple extra. But it seems that most crashes are when you think things are okie and also dokie. Couple of times yesterday the pelaton was packed like hipsters in an iPhone5 line, shoulder to shoulder twenty across and twenty deep on a road that was designed to hold one Citroen with a Vespa on the side. Even though they were just poking along, that looked scarier than any decent I’ve ever seen.
Decent? How about descent?
I’d have to say the most recent high speed get-off I encountered was when that sense of dread hit me square in the face. And then my shoulder hit the ground, my head hit the ground and things went wobbly for a few seconds. Nothing okie or dokie about it. I saw it coming and could do nothing about it. Even now just over eight weeks later I still don’t know what exactly happened.
The TdF will be less of a crashfest if the ASO took care of the course. Depending on the stage some times there is a serious lack of barriers separating the masses from the bikies, and other times (like TTs or prologues) the course is secured tighter than a virgin in a whorehouse. Either chose one or the other, but since it is the French Tour, the anarchy we see now will continue. And that is probably a good reason why we love to follow it so much: you never know what is going to happen!
I have had two minor concussions. (Crits) leather hairnets, remember those.
I had one major concussion. It happened after doing a 9.5:10 somersault over a VW Bug that turned in front of me back when I was in grad school. Woke up some time later with the EMTs hovering over me. I was amazed they got there so fast. They didn’t actually get there that fast….
Took about 9 months to fully recover from the dizzy spells, double vision, and visits from demons. I wish Chris Horner well.