Jonas Vingegaard said that he was lucky to only break his collarbone in the crash that took him out of the Tour de France, as he abandoned the race for the first time.
The Visma-Lease a Bike rider, a two-time winner of the race, crashed on an innocuous bend on stage 15 of the race on Sunday, depriving the Tour of the man in second place.
He was taken away in an ambulance for an X-ray, which confirmed that he had fractured his collarbone, and that he will need surgery.
“It’s going surprisingly well,” he told Danish TV station TV2 later. “It’s of course very disappointing for us to end up like this, and for the Tour to end like this. But that’s how cycling is. Luckily, it’s only a broken collarbone.
“Of course it’s a huge shame. We’re disappointed, and I just hope the boys can now focus next week and hopefully win a stage or two.
“I just talked to my family a little bit. That was the most important thing for me. We’ve come up with a plan for what’s going to happen now, and I’ve talked to some of the team. It’s no use hanging your head. It just makes it worse.”
On Sunday evening, Visma-Lease a Bike reasoned that the crash might have happened because of the line the lead motorbike took through the corner.
“We maybe came into this roundabout a little too fast, and then my front wheel just slips. I can’t do anything,” Vingegaard said. “That’s how cycling races are sometimes. It’s just super annoying for us, to be honest.
“Maybe the motorcycle makes a mistake, but we can’t trust the motorcycles. We have to have our own judgment,” Vingegaard continued. “People make mistakes, and we can’t change that now.”
In his yellow jersey press conference, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) suggested that part of the reason for the crash could be that Vingegaard was woken at 2am by anti-doping testers.
“It is clear that it has not done anything good for it, you could say. Whether that is the reason, I dare not speculate. It may well have done something. I should not be able to say that,” Vingegaard replied, however.
“I don’t want to blame it on that, because it’s a bicycle race, and crashes happen in bicycle races. So I don’t dare answer that.”
