JC Rolls dirty. Photo: AP Photo/Laurent Ciprian
We don’t like to talk about crashing. Talking about crashing before you crash feels a lot like tempting fate and talking about it after you crashed feels a lot like a fisherman bragging about his catch. But crashing is the worst part of our sport apart from getting hit by a car, which has all the worst part of crashing give or take a few tons of metal and possible disembodiment or death.
Waking up the morning after a crash is a feeling that can only be understood by someone who has woken up the morning after a crash. The wounds will have kept you up much of the night, not being able to sleep on one side (or both), which is somehow always your favorite side to sleep on. The lack of movement overnight will mean that the wounds themselves are tight and sore, and the force of the impact will have the result that you know the precise location of every organ within your torso.
Men don’t like to act like they’ve been hurt, unless they’re in a long-term relationship, in which case they will pretend anything hurts so long as no one aside from their partner is around. Under these same circumstances, they are highly susceptible to debilitating cases of Man Flu which require loads of coddling, soup, and beer in order to cure. Outside these two extenuating circumstances, we jump up from any accident and pretend nothing happened, like Inspector Clouseau. Pro Cyclists epitomize that spirit to the maximum, frequently coming off at speed, removing loads of skin, and hopping back onto their bicycles as if nothing happened.
Geraint Thomas, possibly the most Rule Compliant rider in the modern Peloton, epitomized that today with his crash:
Barguil just wiped me out. It was a tight right and he just came around on the inside and knocked me straight off the road. I got back up and started chasing.
Which is also the same thing he did when he got blown off the road in Gent-Wevelgem. Except this time he head-butted a telephone pole and highsided into a ravine first. The race doctor apparently asked him his name to test him for a concussion and he answered with, “Chris Froome.”
JC Peraud came off alone a few days back, for no reason that anyone can articulate other than, “a touch of wheels”, which is what we say whenever we crash for no reason, even when riding alone. He came off at speed, on some of the roughest tarmac imaginable. He was skinned alive, effectively. And, as with Geraint, he got up and not only finished the stage, but rejoined the field. Double stud with a side of Steak Tartare.
And those examples are just from the last three days of racing. The last three days.
Crashing is part of life as a Cyclist. We risk life, limb, and skin. We fall off, we climb back on. Crashing is learned; we know how to fall to minimize “important” damage. “He didn’t crash right,” we say, as if there were a mysterious way to crash right.
We don’t talk about crashing because as a Cyclist, if follows us everywhere we go. It is always there behind us, like the shadow we feel on the backs of our necks when we come up the basement stairs.
Talking about it only makes it real, and crashing is already as real as it needs to be.
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It will never be the end of the argument! Never, I tell you!
G was also interviewed shortly after coming across the finish line by an American reporter.
Interviewer: G, what happened?
G: He (Barguil) took me out. I head butted the pole and was caught up in the bushes down the ditch.
Interviewer: What happened next?
G: I got on the bike and started racing.
My nickname in college was "crash" due in part to the proportional frequency with which I did it (compared to others) and the full-on cheap-bastard college logic of "I can heal but the bike takes money" which typically had me contorting myself mid-flight/skid/fall/tumble to save my stead much to my skin/skull/body's chagrin.
The flip-side of this is that I now have a six-sense race-wise when things get dicey (from all that prior practice) and a newly adopted "F all y'all" attitude about staying upright. I'll not comment on the frequency of my recent crashes as I have a highly disproportionate amount of superstition for my level of education. (I find this to be without contradiction).
I went down recently going 55+kph, in a gravel corner. I slid twenty feet and got up and found that my bike, with all the force of the speed and crash, had catapulted over a six foot barbed wire fence. Was too embarrassed to call any one. So ended up riding the 35km back to my house real easy. Spent the next three days nursing full body road rash and medicating with imperial beers, thc, and norco. Won a single speed mtn race the next weekend.
Re: G. Pretty amazing he came in with behind his group only 40 seconds behind? Well, add to that he started off on the crash bike, but had to change it. I reckon he could have caught them with out have to stop, change, and accelerate off.
I'm on the mend from a 51km/h crash. Cut up by a van who then slammed brakes on. I braked and went over handlebars. Metal plate to repair broken collatbone, 3 fractured ribs, road rash on back and shoulder, bust eyebrow and concussion. I may have bounced but wasn't back up!
I haven't had any serious crashes yet but did myself a back injury avoiding my mate who crashed. My wife is the crasher of the family; being taken out by a car in front of me, crashing into her mate when communication failed, and crashing into me when I paced her back to the group. That was a ride Iin the ambulance and concussion.
@Kevin Hoy
That's it? That's all ya got? Doesn't even belong on the same page with JCP and G-man. Call us when you get HURT.
I have had some serious crashes over the recent years and I've found that besides in the initial days after the crash while I try to process what happened where I'm happy to talk about it with my wife and riding mates, I very quickly would prefer not to talk about it anymore nor about the healing of my injuries especially with those who don't ride. However I find myself still filling them in because I do appreciate the concern, I just know they really don't understand.
JC last year in Quebec. He is even smaller in person than he looks on TV on a bike. A friend called him an elf. Amazing when you consider the punishment these riders take and keep riding. American pro football players? Pffffttt!