BMC Racing’s Dutch rider forced to abandon after falling into a ravine on a mountain descent
Karsten Kroon (BMC Racing) was part of the seventeen-man break that escaped the peloton inside the first five kilometres of the Vuelta a España’s fourteenth stage to La Farrapona. Lagos de Somiedo. Close to the bottom of the long descent of the Puerto de la Ventana, the Dutchman found himself climbing out of a ravine after crashing into it with Garmin-Cervélo’s Sep Vanmarke.
Both men remounted and Vanmarke was able to finish the stage, but Kroon was forced to climb off a few kilometres later. He was taken to hospital where it was discovered that he had fractured his left forearm. Having been briefly knocked unconscious though, the Dutchman remembers very little about the incident.
"I remember two guys who more or less attacked on the descent," Kroon explained. "They both crashed and I think I came around the turn and they were there, or somebody was there. I don't remember."
Whatever the reason for Kroon’s crash, he and Vanmarke found themselves flying off the road, where their fall was thankfully broken by the branches of some trees.
Since it happened on a descent, there was nobody on the road to witness the incident, and BMC Racing’s sports director John Lelangue actually drove past the scene without knowing it.
"We understand it happened in a curve, a left one, which was looking dangerous," Lelangue said afterwards. "In fact, I informed [Assistant Director] Rik Verbrugghe it was dangerous. So I remember well passing there. There was nothing on the ground – no bike, no bottles and no spectators. So no one could inform us that something had happened."
Kroon’s fractured arm is the second broken bone he has sustained in a race this year; the 35-year-old crashed on the descent of the Knokteberg in the Ronde van Vlaanderen, breaking his left collarbone.