"Am I going to s*** myself?" - Michael Woods recounts Tour de France bathroom emergency

Stage 10 of the Tour de France took an unexpected turn for Michael Woods, who vanished from the breakaway not because of fading legs, but because of a sudden and urgent bathroom crisis.

The Canadian rider from Israel–Premier Tech was among the favorites for the day’s win, riding strong until he abruptly disappeared from the front. While many assumed he simply couldn’t match accelerations from Simon Yates and Ben Healy, Woods later set the record straight in a candid and hilarious open letter on his personal website.

“Doing number 2 on the side of the road, in the Tour de France, is simply not a real option. There are too many people. Even stopping to pee is already a challenge,” he wrote. “So, when I started thinking, ‘Am I going to shit myself?’, I had a wonderful revelation: motorhomes have toilets! And there are more motorhomes on the Tour than at Burning Man. Within seconds, I passed one and yelled, ‘Toilette, toilette, toilette!’”

What followed was a frantic dash into a stranger’s camper van, and a rather unsanitary exit.

“To the poor, very kind and bewildered man who opened the door of his motorhome for me, I want first of all to thank him, but also to apologize wholeheartedly for the state in which I left his bathroom. Let's just say that 120 grams of carbohydrates per hour for four hours straight doesn't go out in the best way.”

Not quite how one would imagine meeting a Tour de France cyclist is it?

Woods emerged from the motorhome to a crowd of confused fans and the realisation that he had no idea where he was in the race. “As a crowd of confused fans looked on, I finally and rather embarrassingly climbed out of the motorhome, got back on my bike and realized I had no idea where I was in the race relative to the rest of the peloton.

"I had been on the inside longer than I'd like to admit (unlike Dumoulin, I didn't have a jersey to defend and wasn't in that much of a hurry), and when a group of riders caught up to me, I said to Julian Alaphilippe, ‘I have no idea if I'm still in front of the peloton or if I've already been passed.’ I explained why, we both laughed and then talked about how much easier it was to ride before.”