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Well, we are all staggering this morning: yesterday's stage of the Tour could very nearly have ended in disaster, in several ways, after some demented idiots thought it would be funny to throw carpet tacks onto the road, on the final climb of the day.
This was insanely dangerous for the cyclists, and poor Kiserlovski is now out of the race with a broken collarbone, thanks to these stupid people.
It wasn't even just the cyclists - here's a camerabike tyre with two carpet tacks clearly visible:
[caption id="attachment_1232" align="alignnone" width="600"]
Camera bike tyre with carpet tacks, Tour de France.[/caption]And here are some of the tacks which were removed from tyres:
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Carpet tacks removed from punctured tyres after some idiots threw them onto the road in front of the peloton.[/caption]For the benefit of non-UK viewers, carpet tacks are not nails, they are flat-headed metal tacks, used (as the name suggests) to hold down carpets. They are particularly nasty in this application, as the flat head means that when dropped, a high proportion will stand up on the flat head, with the pointy bit upwards: they not only have very sharp points, but the "shank" is not round, it is flat-sided and these sides are also very sharp.
They are designed to cut a three-cornered slit in stout carpet material, and I think we all know what they did to bicycle tyres.
Latest news so far indicates that they were scattered over the road some 200-300metres before the top of the hill. LLB and I discussed it at length, and I think it's quite clear that it was done by spectators, on foot, standing beside the road, and that they threw the tacks into the road as the race was passing them.
The fact that the break and the first block of the peloton were unaffected supports my view.
If caught, they should at least be done for the French equivalent of GBH (Grievous Bodily Harm) for causing a broken collarbone, and really they should be done for attempted manslaughter.
(Technically, for GBH you have to break the skin and spill blood - no really, this is absolutely true - but I think in this case breaking a collarbone and potentially ruining a career deserves to be punished.)
I mean, it's not just the riders, it's all the motorbikes as well: security bikes, camera bikes, TV bikes, interviewer bikes, Mavik bikes: one of those losing air pressure part-way down the descent could easily have been fatal.
Why would anyone do this? What sort of sick society do they come from, that they think it's ok, or funny, to do this?
My hope is that someone in the crowd will have caught them on their camera-phone, and will post it up on YooToob.
I reckon that if you had them loose in your hand, and started off by leaning both arms over the barrier, it would be quite easy to raise your arms as though just waving them, flinging tacks onto the road. I am sure that with the noise of the camera bikes, you would never hear them hitting the road surface, and as everyone would be watching the race, it's likely that no-one would see them do it.
So my hope is for someone nearly opposite to have unknowingly caught it all, clearly, on film.
I have no idea if these morons were actively targeting any specific riders, or allowing any specific riders to pass before spoiling everyone else's day: or whether they just wanted to spoil the race for everyone, indiscriminately.
I'm not quite sure which is worse: what do you think?
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