Vingegaard, serious fall at the Tour of the Basque Country

On the bicycle the first rule is to stay upright, survive, get to the finish line. The road is bad, littered with sinister omens, as was the Hermitage of San Cristobal de las Cruces de Aranguio: to get there, from the road that the runners followed in the 4th stage of the Tour of the Basque Country, you need to climb over boulders that indicate the way . Left turn, unprotected. Asphalt, the Basque Pello Bilbao will say upon arrival, «full of depressions created by the roots of the trees». Result: group fall. 12 runners down like skittles. Among them, not by chance, the 3 most important. They marked each other and thus fell together Remco Evenepoel (broken right collarbone and shoulder blade), Primoz Roglic (ended up in a concrete tank for the collection of waste water, nothing broken), and Jonas Vingegaard, the winner of the last two Tours de France , a season to be lived in parallel with Tadej Pogacar until the big yellow clash in July. The Dane, among the 3, has the worst: he scrapes on the asphalt, perhaps hits a road sign with his head or back and ends up in the grass. He is unable to get up, he screams, some of his teammates come back: «I didn’t think twice, our captain needed help» Milan Vader will say.

At that point frost descends on the race. The following three ambulances take away Jay Vine (two broken thoracic vertebrae), Steff Cras (punctured lungs, broken ribs, vertebrae injuries) and then, after at least 20 minutes, also Vingegaard, with a collar and oxygen mask. An absolute drama on an interim day of a training race for the big names, in which the result was less essential than doing the legwork in view of the important events. Vingegaard escaped with a broken collarbone and some broken ribs. The Tour could be safe, it will depend above all on the rib fractures, but it will not be easy to recover. Injury similar to that of teammate Wout Van Aert, who fell eight days ago at Dwars door Vlaanderen, a training run for Flanders: broken ribs and cracked sternum. He has already gone out for a first training session, he would like to race the Giro instead but he only has a month.

Cycling is changing, but for the worse. You don’t fall more but, given today’s speeds, you hurt yourself much more. Protection for runners, like airbags for skiers? Difficult, but even the helmet was optional until 20 years ago, and yesterday someone really saved it. Solutions are being sought, such as the bizarre chicane created to prevent direct entry into the Arenberg Forest, in Paris-Roubaix on Sunday. Instead of 60 per hour, it will reach 30. The runners asked for it, not everyone agrees.

The union, through its president Adam Hansen, asked the TV channels not to linger on the images of the rescue. The stage, neutralized for the group, even continued for the six on the run at the moment of the fall and there was also a winner. But while Louis Meintjes tried not to show his happiness, the video of the disaster at -35 was repeated on the race’s social networks with dramatic music in the background. A day of ordinary horror. Like others there will be, it is written, it is inevitable, in a cycling that breaks speed records in practically every race, capable of running the second part of the Sanremo at an average of 49. Maximum speed, maximum profit, maximum risk.

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