Dauphine TT Tumble

Ouch!

For anyone who missed it, here's why Andy lost 9 minutes in the TT yesterday:  oh, ok, to be strictly accurate, this is why Andy lost maybe 6 minutes extra in the TT yesterday:


Points of note:

Pic 1 - top l left - is that Kinesio tape on the back of his neck? Is that an old injury, do we think, or a clever way to counterbalance the strain of maintaining the broken-neck aero position?

And you will note not only the lack of a large amount of skinsuit (and skin) on the hip, but the outside of his shoe has been scraped away as well. Ouch.

Picture 2 - top right - also shows that his skinsuit is ripped under the arm, so that must have been a heavy fall, poor boy.

Yet he bounces back on the bike, and off he goes, and "only" loses 9 minutes overall. I reckon a fall like that would lose you at least 2 minutes just to get back up and on the bike, and possibly another minute to get back up to speed: but it must be a mighty shock to the system,  and would probably slow any rider down quite a bit: in a TT lasting around the hour mark,  probably by several minutes.

So on balance I think Andy did remarkably well to only lose, what was it, 9 minutes? He said himself that after the crash, his ribs hurt and his hand hurt, he couldn't concentrate properly, he couldn't get into the aero position, and he just wanted to get to the end and stop.

Luckily Mr Bruyneel seems to have taken note of the response to his rather "in yer face" public name-and-shame management style, and has toned it all down a bit: he was quite positive about Andy's performance, and had the grace not to blame him for falling off.

And as an aside, where is Andy's radio? Usually you can clearly see the rectangular box through the skinsuit, generally on the back of the waist. I have often wondered at the wisdom of doing that, bearing in mind that if they fall and land on their backs (not that common, I know) then surely having a solid  hard box against the spine would be a bad thing.

To see the better quality pictures, and to see what Andy and Mr Bruyneel said,  they are on the Shack website.