For the past week, I've been pretty much without internet access -- making it difficult to keep up the blog (or to keep up with much of anything, for that matter). But
look at what happened in the great big old bicycle race in France while I was away.
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| Alberto Contador's Specialized McLaren Tarmac -- a surprise? |
So, Contador is out of the race with a broken tibia, and various rumors are circulating the web about his bike, which was apparently broken in half. At least four different stories were put forth by Specialized, first denying that the bike was broken at all, then saying it was broken because it fell off the roof of a car. Then the story was that it was not Contador's bike, but teammate Nicolas Roche's, and that it was
run over by a car. Then the story changed again -- it
was Contador's bike (the clearly visible number plate made that much clear) that got run over by the car. Never mind that the bike is broken cleanly, not smashed. Then, the last version (which
VeloNews calls the "most plausible") was that the bike was on the roof of the team car and got clipped by a bike on the roof of
another team car when trying to pass on a very narrow road.
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| Really cruel irony with the PowerBar ad on the VeloNews article. |
There was no actual video footage of Contador's crash, but on the NBCSports TV coverage, one could see a Tinkoff-Saxo bike being picked up after the crash, and it at least
appeared to be intact, so it's hard to say exactly what happened. According to the VeloNews story, the initial report on the Tour's race radio, as well as NBC Sports' Steve Porino, who arrived just after the crash, reported that Contador's bike was "in pieces." Porino's report said Contador's "frame snapped in half. They threw it in a heap in the back of the car."
While we may never know exactly what happened -- if the bike broke and caused the crash, or if the crash broke the bike, or if the bike was actually broken in some unrelated incident -- I don't have much trouble believing that a carbon fiber bike, built to get every advantage by cutting weight at the expense of durability, might actually break during use. Anybody who's surprised by such a dramatically broken bike is kidding themselves. It doesn't exactly make good ad copy, but it happens all the time.
