Austria's Bernhard Kohl may not have expected to finish up on the podium in the men's road race last weekend in the World Championships, but he also didn't expect to end up sick as a dog.
"The first nine rounds went very well, actually, and I felt relatively good. The race was going perfectly and I could stay with the others," he wrote on his website, bernhardkohl.at. "From the beginning my stomach felt a little funny, but I didn't pay much attention to it."
He might have done better to listen to his stomach. "Then, at the start of the tenth round, it was suddenly as if I had lost all my strength. I couldn't keep up with the field even on the flat. That is really brutal, when you can't do anything from one minute to the next," the Gerolsteiner rider continued.
"Five minutes later I knew what was wrong with me. My stomach just went totally crazy. I threw up a number of times and had diarrhoea, too." That was the end of his race, needless to say. And if that wasn't enough, "I developed a fever later in the afternoon. Now I am laying in bed and still can't eat anything. When I try to eat something, it just comes right back up."
