According to Spanish daily AS, the British woman was driving a right-hand drive car when the incident took place at Benigembla, near Alicante. “Perhaps it was a moment of forgetfulness and she was driving on the side of the road she’s used to [in the UK],” a source close to the investigation told AS.
The source added: “But here we drive on the other side of the road and this kind of carelessness almost resulted in lives being lost.”
The paper also reported that the British woman splits her time between homes in Britain and Spain, spending six months of the year in each.
Giant-Alpecin’s Ramon Sinkeldam, one of the six riders hurt in the incident, appeared to confirm that the car had been on the wrong side of the road when he told Dutch news agency NOS: “The group panicked when a car came straight at us, there was a lot of shouting and I don’t remember anything for a good while after that.”
Peter Cossins has written about professional cycling since 1993 and is a contributing editor to Procycling. He is the author of The Monuments: The Grit and the Glory of Cycling's Greatest One-Day Races (Bloomsbury, March 2014) and has translated Christophe Bassons' autobiography, A Clean Break (Bloomsbury, July 2014).
