Jonas Vingegaard crashed on stage five of Paris-Nice on Thursday before losing 26 seconds on a steep finish, ceding the race lead in the process.
The Visma-Lease a Bike rider was involved in an innocuous-looking crash with 84km to go, but quickly remounted. He suffered a cut to his upper lip, but resumed racing soon after swapping bikes and being attended to by the race doctor. He is understood to have hurt his wrist, and will be examined.
However, come the steep finish on the Côte de Notre-Dame-de-Sciez, the two-time Tour de France winner was dropped with just under a kilometre to go. He ended up losing 26 seconds to the day's winner, Lenny Martinez (Bahrain-Victorious), and lost the race lead to his teammate, Matteo Jorgenson. He now lies in second, 22 seconds behind the American. At the finish, he could be seen holding his wrist.
It was the first crash for Vingegaard since he was involved in the high-speed incident at Itzulia Basque Country in April last year, which saw him break ribs, his collarbone and suffer a punctured lung.
The incident at Paris-Nice comes the week after Vingegaard's great rival, Tadej Pogačar, crashed at Strade Bianche, although the UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider went on to win that race after remounting.
"It's mixed feelings for me," Jorgenson, now the race leader, said. "Personally I felt very strong. I was coming back from a nature break and saw Jonas had a crash, he then found me in the race and told me that he thought his hand was possibly broken. It was really painful for him and I know he had a hard time braking and a hard time holding his handlebars.
"He told me just to go for it myself and that he'd try and do his best," he continued. "We tried to get him back in the race but he seemed to be in a lot of pain. I tried my hardest to manage it from an offensive position on the last climb, because I knew that if I set a harder pace then it was better for me. I'm happy that we kept the jersey under these circumstances, but it's not in the way I'd have imagined."
"I don't really know what happened," his teammate Victor Campenaerts told Sporza post-race. "Halfway through the stage, they got caught in the peloton and Jonas fell on his face."
"He had hurt his hand a lot and could no longer use his left brake" he continued. "We then chose to stay out of the stress and to move up the slopes. That is of course not ideal, because you lose a lot of strength with that. The damage in time is limited, but hopefully there is not too much damage from the fall."
"Jonas talked about dizziness," Campenaerts added. "He must have suffered incredibly. Now he has to visit the doctor and hopefully the verdict will be not so bad.
"Given the circumstances, it's very impressive that he finished this stage. I didn't get the impression that he was very lucid. He got through it a little bit, but he couldn't hold his brake anymore."
