Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my Tour de France 2005 list.
Posted on 07/01/2005 4:09:26 PM PDT by nutmeg
Lance Armstrong's black eye was mostly healed by Thursday's pre-Tour de France press conference, but he still sported a few small cuts, legacy of a training crash last week that put him over the handlebars and cracked the six-times Tour winner's helmet in two.
Not to be outdone, Jan Ullrich crashed into the back of his T-Mobile team car while out training. Ullrich was motorpacing behind directeur sportif Mario Kummer when Kummer braked hard on a stretch of wet pavement. Ullrich hit the back window, shattering it, but sustained little more than a few cuts and claimed to be fine.
And Phonak's Oscar Pereiro, one of that team's trio of GC contenders, crashed while training near Nantes. Pereiro sustained bruises to his hip, knee and elbow, but team doctors shrugged off the problem saying that it would not hamper Pereiro's start.
Last year, the principle victim of a pre-race crash was Australian Matt White, who hit a telecommunications cable laid across the road while warming up for the prologue. He broke his collarbone and couldn't start the race; Cofidis rushed in Peter Farazijn, via police escort, to take his start place. With the Tour starting tomorrow in Noirmoutier, perhaps the rest of the riders should just stay in their hotel rooms.
Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my Tour de France 2005 list.
These guys sure get dinged a lot. NASCAR almost seems safe by comparison.
In NASCAR, one has a steel frame around themselves in the event of a crash. In bicycle racing, one gets to bounce off the pavement, post, etc. all alone.
I've had two pretty hard crashes where my helmet smacked the road hard enough to crack the foam inside the helmet yet the shell remained intact. I think the helmet is designed to do just that and I can't imagine the helmet being in two pieces afterward.
That's true, but at least on a bike you don't run the risk of being immolated.
Kummer is dummer that sh...
I don't know what immolated means offhand and I'm too lazy to look it up, but I hate crashing on a bike!
Bouncing on Pavement = bigtime OUCH!
I think the technical definition has to do with making a sacrifice (like Hindu widows burned on their husbands' funeral pyres), but to me it just means being burned up in any fire.
LOL!
Ready to go. Tivo is ready, going for a 100km ride on monday, and watching the tour on tivo when I am done. Can't wait.
My the 4 1/2 year old son cracked a helmet after falling last year. I wasn't too upset at having to buy him a new one.
No, I'm afraid I won't be running any of those, at least this weekend anyway. I'll have to watch the late replays of Le Tour (I won't be around much during the day tomorrow, Sunday and part of Monday). Feel free to start a live thread, though... sounds like a cool idea. ;-)
Put Tour de France as a keyword (or in the title) on any TDF-related thread, so it'll be easy for any of us to find later.
Nice to see you again, jern! Enjoy that 100km ride on Monday. ;-)
I've added you to my TDF 2005 ping list as you requested.
LOL... love that devil! Will he be back this year? (probably will)
Yikes! Thank God for those helmets...
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