When you see fresh road rash, the first thing that strikes you is how pink it is: big abrasions, more like burns, that spread down limbs, through torn lycra, and then bloom into blood.
There was a lot of that today. Twelve stages in with less than 500 m to go, the peloton was split by the biggest crash we’ve seen so far this Tour. Vlad Van Mechelen (Bahrain Victorious) moved to the left, Fernando Gaviria (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA) clipped his wheel, and then about half the bunch came to a standstill. The lucky ones were merely unable to contest the sprint, but there were many that were less lucky than that.
A few hundred metres past the finish, with the buses stretching along the curve of the river in Chalon-sur-Saône, there were grim signs of this Tour’s first proper crash.
First to limp past was Søren Wærenskjold (Uno-X Mobility): the big Norwegian whose past few days have typified the varied tides of the Tour de France. On Tuesday, he crashed. Yesterday, he won the stage. Today, he crashed again. His shorts were torn on the right buttock after sliding along the tarmac, with more blood on his elbow and black marks on the shoulder, in addition to an entire left leg encased in mesh from the earlier crash. Understandably, he wasn’t keen to talk, disappearing into the bus to lick his wounds.
A few minutes later on a gentle uphill after the finish line, Gaviria rolled past, arm cradled ominously as he was pushed along by a teammate. His legs too were on their way to blooming, and the discomfort was clear on his face. There were worse injuries lurking within: it was later announced that he’d broken his collarbone, as was the case for Lotto-Intermarché’s Jenno Berckmoes. In that context, Van Mechelen’s relegation – not good for him, clearly, but not a race-ending injury – was an easy escape.
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