Jonas Vingegaard Felled Yet Again By The Cruelty Of His Sport

ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — Exactly 84 minutes after Jonas Vingegaard spiked his right collarbone into a curb and limped into an ambulance and out of the Tour de France, the assembled press watched him gingerly wince his way down the steps of the Visma bus and into a waiting team car.

A scrambled pack-job followed.

A soigneur could barely hold the pile of backpacks and duffel bags he was carrying off the bus.

A team doctor stood by holding two large red-and-yellow first-aid kits, adopting the tense posture and alert facial expressions of someone who knows they can't help but desperately wants to.

The eventual driver nearly spilled Vingegaard's stuff all over the tarmac of a wholly unremarkable road, in an unremarkable town, at the base of the final climb of Stage 15 of the Tour de France.

And then the two-time champion was off to the hospital.

For the first time since his 2021 debut, Vingegaard has abandoned the Tour.

When something as shocking and painful as Vingegaard's crash happens, there is an understandable rush for a totalizing explanation or some form of oblique narrative resolution.

That's especially true on an already-fraught day for Vingegaard at the Tour.

Surely the crash can be explained to satisfaction, clear blame divined, verdicts rendered, lessons learned.

Surely there's some way to then frame that resolution against Vingegaard's future hopes or past triumphs such that it means something.

But there's only false refuge to be found down that road.

When Vingegaard fell with 22 kilometers left on Sunday, he simply found himself subject to the mundane cruelty of his sport.

Vingegaard was pretty clearly not going to be relieve Tadej Pogacar of the yellow jersey in the final week of the Tour, but he and his team were having a go of it nonetheless when the crash happened.

Victor Campenaerts was pulling hard at the front of the peloton, 11 kilometers from the foot of the Solaison, in an attempt to bring back the strong breakaway up the road.

They encountered https://escapecollective.com/what-really-caused-vingegaards-crash/">a normal roundabout—my colleague Iain Treloar later overheard Vingegaard's teammate Sepp Kuss saying "There are 100 roundabouts like that every day"—and the leading race motorcycle took an outside line around the cobbled triangle splitting the corner.

Campenaerts blindly followed instead of judging the correct line.