One of the few crumbs of comfort on Primož Roglič’s umpteenth tough day at the Tour de France was that after he crossed the finish line on stage 12, battered and bruised from a high-speed crash and with his GC ambitions seriously challenged, was the proximity of his team bus to the finish line. It was one of the closest.
Second in line next to the TotalEnergies cluster of vehicles in a line stretching down a long country boulevard on the outskirts of Viileneuve-sur-Lot, Roglič could therefore reach the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe bus in the space of just a few minutes. He headed inside without talking to reporters to remove his torn race kit and damaged helmet, and, after a shower, begin a full assessment of the scale of his injuries.
“Now the doctor will examine him and we will see,” team manager Rolf Aldag told the dozens reporters crowding around the temporary barrier erected between the bus and the road to give riders and staff some space.
The time loss itself was already there in black and white: 2:27 on the main peloton, meaning that Roglič - already the worst placed of the ‘Big Four’ - slid to 4:42 down on race leader Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates). It was his second crash in less than 24 hours after falling late on stage 11 while in company of Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep).
But unlike his fall close to the finish at Le Lioran on Thursday, this time he was well outside the three - ‘safety zone’, and the time gap when he crossed the line was the time gap that figured on the results sheet.
Unsurprisingly, none of Roglič’s teammates were willing to discuss the situation, given the uncertainty surrounding the scale of Roglic’s injuries. Although he could complete the stage, any underlying injuries could take a while to be discovered, as happened with his teammate Aleksandr Vlasov, when he broke his ankle on stage 9, but he finished the day’s racing, only for the fracture to appear during subsequent medical investigations. The near-disastrous consequences this has had for the Slovenian’s GC bid were clear, too, but as staff were at pains to emphasise afterwards, what really mattered was the health of the rider himself.
“He’s showering now so he cleans up everything," Aldag said. "Obviously he came to the finish line, obviously he lost some time and that’s not good, and certainly we wanted to avoid that.”
Aldag had not had time to talk with Roglič yet about how the crash happened, with the physical consequences rather than the reasons being the team’s immediate concern.
“No, everybody is under the impression just that the crash happened and we lost a lot of time and we care about his health right now, because that’s the most important thing right now,” he said.
Asked about the fight for the GC, Aldag ushered a brief, hollow laugh and then said, “Right now we have different thoughts than fighting for the podium.
“It’s about really how he is, like if he can continue or not. We have the best medical team you can think of and we will see what happens tonight and tomorrow.”
He had no idea of the time loss, he said, in response to another reporter asking virtually the same question. “I don’t know how much it is, somewhere like four minutes on GC, but that’s not what’s important or too relative right now. The key thing is he crashed really, really hard and we have other riders to think of. It’s never good, it’s never nice and it certainly wasn’t the plan.”
Aldag was certainly not in a mood to start the blame game, either, when he was asked by one reporter about the road furniture in the run-in perhaps not being marked that well.
”I think it’s what we deal with every day - we all have upfront cars, we all knew everybody would be really tired after a day like this, and things like that happen.
“They [the road furniture] are good for 364 days a year, to protect people in normal traffic, but it’s definitely not protective for riders in the final. But nobody is to blame, it is right there and we knew it would be there, I don’t know if there was any alternative to reach the city centre than to take that road.”
As for Roglič himself and the consequences, Aldag added, “He’s definitely hurt and we have to listen to our medical team, see what they think and what he can do.”
Resilience
Whatever the final fallout, the events of stage 12 for Roglič are, regrettably, just the latest chapter in a series of misfortunes and crashes that have dogged the Slovenian in the Tour de France in recent years.
After losing the Tour in 2020 on the last possible day to Pogačar in the Plances des Belles Filles time trial, in both 2021 and 2022, Roglič had to abandon the race because of the fallout from unlucky first-week crashes. In 2021, on a chaotic stage 3 when he was one of the dozens of riders to fall dangerously narrow roads in the finale, Roglič completed the course but eventually abandoned a few days later. Then in 2022, he ran into a safety haybale on the Roubaix stage, dislocating his shoulder and suffering a back injury. Again, he battled on, only to abandon after the Alps.
Roglič’s determination to continue for as long as possible was a tribute to his massive resilience that has always characterized the Slovenian, but this year he has had another series of crashes to contend with.
One of the fallers in the mass accident in Itzulia-Basque Country this April whilst leading the race, Roglič skipped Liège-Bastogne-Liège this spring as a result. He returned to racing in the Critérium du Dauphiné and managed to win it outright. But during the race he took a heavy fall on stage 5, that saw the stage neutralised so many riders were involved, and that also took its toll.
As for the Tour, earlier this week when Roglič talked to journalists on the first rest day, he was celebrating being in his best position overall - and with no crashes - since 2020. However, the events of Friday caused the latest upheaval in the Slovenian’s rollercoaster relationship with the race.
As ever in these situations, while media were outside the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe waiting for Aldag to speak, the banal and everyday mixed easily with the drama and the tension currently enveloping the team.
One elderly French woman - obviously oblivious to the latest development - approached the waiting press officer to say she’d heard that the team were giving out free gifts and if so could she have one, please? After she wandered away empty-handed, someone invisible stuck their mobile phone out from behind the curtain on the bus stairs and took a picture of the mass of waiting journalists.
Bikes were cleaned up and packed away, team vehicles slowly dislodged themselves from the mass of vehicles lined on each side of the narrow country streets and peeled away to their respective hotels. The Tour de France goes on, in other words, as unstoppable as ever.
Whether this year’s peloton will still contain Roglič on Friday morning, though, remains anyone’s guess.
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