Sepp Kuss is never much given to making a fuss, and he wasn’t going to make an exception even when he was the victim of a crash caused by a spectator leaning into the road on stage 15 of the Tour de France.
The North American was one of several fallers with 128km remaining after a spectator bearing a phone leant into the path of the peloton. Other riders to come down in the same incident included his Jumbo-Visma teammate Nathan Van Hooydonck, Biniam Girmay (Intermarché-Circus-Gobert) and Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers).
Kuss sustained cuts to his elbow and knee in the crash, but he quickly remounted and re-joined the peloton. He was once more Jonas Vingegaard’s last man on the final climb of the race. Although Kuss was distanced from the yellow jersey group when Tadej Pogačar’s teammate Adam Yates accelerated inside the final 4km of the ascent of Le Bettex, he remained in sixth place overall at day’s end.
“There was a spectator leaning into the road, I guess. It just happened suddenly and that’s part of the Tour, there are a lot of people,” Kuss said of the crash. “Ideally that wouldn’t happen, but it’s the biggest bike race in the world and a lot of people don’t know exactly what’s going on.
“There was a narrowing in a town. We were just trying to slow down the peloton to let the break go and then just on the side unfortunately, somebody wanted to get a selfie. I didn’t really see it coming.”
Kuss downplayed the gravity of his injuries, insisting that they had little impact on his performance over the remainder of the stage, which brought the peloton over the Col de la Forclaz, Col de la Croix Fry and Col des Aravis ahead of the two-part haul to the finish.
“No, no, luckily the adrenaline got me through the day,” said Kuss. “I mean you just have to keep going, there’s nothing else to do about it. It’s inconvenient, but it could have been worse, and I still felt pretty good on the bike.”
Kuss’ team manager Richard Plugge was rather less conciliatory about the episode, which bore unfortunate echoes of the infamous ‘Opi-Omi’ crash on the opening day of the 2021 Tour, when Jumbo-Visma’s Tony Martin was among the worst affected when a spectator leant into the road bearing a cardboard sign.
Speaking to Wielerflits, Plugge maintained that Kuss would have lasted longer by Vingegaard’s side in the finale had he not been nursing the effects of his crash.
“He normally never has to do that on a climb like today,” Plugge said. “That is the biggest blow of today: Nathan fell hard, Dylan [van Baarle] fell, and Sepp fell. That messed up our tactics today. We missed Nathan as a strong force in the early part of the stage and Sepp at the end.”
No matter, Vingegaard had the strength to withstand Pogačar’s offensive in the final kilometre to finish in the same time as the Slovenian and retain his 10-second lead in the overall standings as the race breaks for its second and final rest day. Like Kuss, Vingegaard seemed almost resigned to the unpredictability of roadside behaviour, though he made an appeal to spectators all the same.
“You also cannot say that people are not allowed, but I think spectators just have to act nice,” Vingegaard said in his post-race press conference. “Don’t stand on the road and take a picture. Just be on the side of the road, not in the road.”
After riding on the front all day in a bid to wear down Pogačar on Saturday, Jumbo-Visma were marginally more restrained on stage 15, delegating the seemingly indefatigable Wout van Aert to go up the road in the break. The Belgian’s afternoon ended in frustration, however, as he had to settle for second behind Wout Poels (Bahrain Victorious). “I showed today that I still have a lot of morale. I’ve never lost heart,” he said.
The Vingegaard-Pogačar duel, meanwhile, remains as tight and unpredictable as ever following three tense days in the mountains. Indeed, in the second week of the race, the gap between the two has shifted by only seven seconds, but there is scope for greater separation when the race resumes on Tuesday with a 22km time trial to Combloux.
“It’s going to keep exploding every day,” Kuss said. “It’s super tight and the time trial the day after tomorrow is going to be really interesting. I don’t think anybody can predict what’s going to happen there and then afterwards with a really hard mountain stage.”
