Broken hearts (and bones)

I spoke a few days ago about heartbreaking bike crashes and since then the Tour de France has witnessed a couple of them.

In stage Fifteen Oscar Pereiro crashed on a switchback decent, he went over the edge and fell down to the road (when it switched back) below. Easily, that could have been fatal and it wouldn't have been the first fatal crash in the Tour. There have been three fatal crashes in the Tour (most recently Fabio Casartelli in 1995, also in stage fifteen). In fact, at first it looked like this was a fatal crash. The riders slowed down when they passed Pereiro, laying motionless on the pavement. His teammates stopped to check on him, of course. Miraculously he survived with only a broken arm (shoulder or elbow, I'm not entirely sure).

In stage Sixteen John Lee Augustyn crashed on another steep decent. He was fine, but unfortunately he lost his bike and had to wait several minutes for his team car to come with a replacement bike.

Augustyn, the youngest rider in the peleton this year (he'll be twenty-two next month), is riding in the Tour de France for the first time. On the final climb (the highest in the Tour) he dropped all of the top climbers in this years Tour. He accelerated about half a kilometer from the summit and no one could stay on his wheel. Just a few minutes later, on the decent, he crashed and had to do some fancy climbing up the nearly sheer face of the mountain to get back on the road. His bike though was lost and since his team was down to only a few riders by that point they're only allowed one team car and it was following behind the rest of the peleton (about seven or eight minutes behind him).

Crashes in the Tour are often dramatic, but these two are even more so than usual. They really highlight the danger involved in professional bike racing.