Alberto Contador (Tinkoff-Saxo) crashed and broke his leg on stage 10(Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com)
Alberto Contador after injuring his leg(Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com)
Alberto Contador in the team car after pulling out(Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com)
Tinkoff Saxo general manager Stefano Feltrin has looked to put the Alberto Contador crash controversy to bed by stating that the Spaniard crashed once and that the Specialized bike that broke in two was the result of a car crash rather than the Spaniard’s fall.
Almost as soon as Contador hit the deck on stage 10 race commentators and social media were whipped into a hedonistic frenzy with speculation that Contador’s frame had snapped, causing him to crash. The Spaniard attempted to carry on racing but a broken tibia saw him climb off.
“It’s very simple. Alberto was towards the front with his teammates. He was trying to get something from his pocket and had one hand on the bars. He hit a bump and it caused his hand to slip and he went over the front of the bike. There was only one crash,” Feltrin told Cyclingnews.
“Nico [Roche] stopped and gave him his bike and Alberto rode his bike for around a kilometre. Alberto then had to stop because he had blood pouring from the wound and he had a broken shoe. He waited for a car and we saw the doctor dress his wound. At that point we had two cars and he took a spare bike from one car and he changed his shoe.”
Part of the frenzy came about after pictures were taken of a snapped Tinkoff Saxo bike appeared on line. A bike did snap, however this was caused by a Belkin and Tinkoff car colliding during the stage.
“On the second car, the one that Steven de Jongh was driving, there was another spare bike. There’s one per rider on each team car. Now the car that Steven de Jongh was driving became tangled with the Belkin team car. The bike that was destroyed was that third bike. So Alberto crashed once and it had nothing to do with his bike.”
Asked by there has been such a storm surrounding Contador’s fall, Feltrin replied: “To be honest I saw the bike and saw it broken and there’s been a lot of speculation and a lot of people pick up on that. One person sees something, another sees something else. The bike that was snapped was never used.”
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Daniel Benson was the Editor in Chief at Cyclingnews.com between 2008 and 2022. Based in the UK, he joined the Cyclingnews team in 2008 as the site's first UK-based Managing Editor. In that time, he reported on over a dozen editions of the Tour de France, several World Championships, the Tour Down Under, Spring Classics, and the London 2012 Olympic Games. With the help of the excellent editorial team, he ran the coverage on Cyclingnews and has interviewed leading figures in the sport including UCI Presidents and Tour de France winners.
