Some media reports after yesterday’s crash-strewn third stage of the Tour de France suggested that Team Sky’s Simon Gerrans was out of the race, but the Australian will instead start today’s stage. He’s battered and bruised, but fortunately images of him lying in a crumpled heap under his bike made things look a little more serious than they have turned out to be.
Gerrans hit the deck with 70 kilometres left in yesterday’s stage, and later wrote about the incident on his blog.
“I would like to describe exactly how my day was but if I did, my mother would clean my mouth out with a bar of soap,” he stated, with some humour.
“I was on food and water duties so I was going back and forth to the team car and refueling the guys when required. It was a really important stage today so we were helping Brad [Bradley Wiggins] as much as possible, including heading into the pave sectors in the second half of the race. I got through the first sector well placed in the first 10 or 15 riders with Brad up the front and out of trouble.
“Not long after that sector of pave I dropped back to the car to get some bidons for the guys. After handing out the bidons, the bunch slowed down to squeeze through a one lane roundabout. I didn’t notice this immediately and once I did I had to hit the brakes really hard to slow down. I went up on my front wheel…I think someone came across in front of me, as the next thing I knew I was going straight over the bars. I hit the deck landing on my face. The only way I can describe this would be to dive off a diving board into an empty swimming pool.”
Gerrans lay on the ground for several seconds, then gingerly got back to his feet. His bike was broken in two and his face was bashed up. He got attention from the race doctor and then made his way to the finish, concentrating more on doing so safely rather than fighting for position.
His face had swollen up further by the time he got to the team bus and received stitches from the team doctor there. After that, he got some scans in the hospital and was relieved to hear that there was nothing broken. He got additional stitches there.
Fortunately, he’ll be able to continue in the race, albeit in a sore way. “I now have a lot less skin than I had started the day with a couple of stitches and a ripper black eye, which I guess will be worse tomorrow,” he wrote yesterday evening. “In cycling we say that bad luck comes in threes…I’ve now had three crashes in three days so I hope it turns out better from here on.”
Gerrans is one of a few riders in cycling to have taken stage wins in all three Grand Tours. He nabbed a mountain stage in the 2008 Tour and then followed that up with a triumph in last year’s Giro. He completed the hat-trick when he took stage ten of the Vuelta a España.