Evenepoel's speed entering yesterday's turn: 78.2km/h. #Itzulia2024
"If you see nothing, you know nothing" - Patrick Evenepoel defends controversial TV coverage of Itzulia Basque Country crash
CyclingFriday, 05 April 2024 at 18:30
The TV coverage of the mass crash on stage 4 of the Itzulia Basque Country caused quite a stir on social media. With the race neutralised for over 20 minutes, viewers were forced to watch repeats of the crash itself and close up images of riders strewn across the ground and in pain.
Whilst for many, these pictures left a bad taste in the mouth, for Patrick Evenepoel, father of the Soudal - Quick-Step leader, Remco Evenepoel, who was caught up in the crash and forced to abandon the race in ambulance, being able to see his son was a reassuring sight.
"I have to say: I was relieved when I saw him walk. After that, my thoughts were mostly with Jonas Vingegaard, Jay Vine and Steff Cras. Those are also kids, partners, dads... those images go through my mind," Evenepoel senior recalls to HLN. "If you see nothing, you know nothing. We experienced it when Remco plunged into the ravine in Il Lombardia. You are only reassured when you can see him, like yesterday."
"You just want to see your child moving, what the injuries are you will hear afterwards," he continues. "If you saw Vingegaard lying there...he was barely moving and had to be given oxygen. His parents and wife see that too. The same with Steff Cras, lying there in that pit. With him too, you saw immediately that it was serious. If that concrete ditch is not there, I think the consequences are much less bad. It's because Remco has to jump that he loses control of his bike and falls. And another lucky thing that he was able to jump, because others fell full into that culvert, just like Björg Lambrecht in his fatal fall. And there the speed was even lower."
"How he jumped over that concrete ditch and flew right next to that tree...It all happened so fast. I think the Lidl-Trek rider touched Remco's rear wheel. But, that boy couldn't do anything about it," he continues. "He is now on his way by car to Belgium, to travel a bit more comfortably anyway. That scapula in particular is sore. At Herentals hospital they will now investigate further whether it is a fracture or a crack."
Nevertheless, Evenepoel senior seems relatively optimistic in the early signs of his son's recovery. "He also realises that we cannot change anything about the situation and is already planning again. You saw that with Wout van Aert too: those guys immediately turn the page," he concludes.
claps 6visitors 931
Just in
Popular news
Latest comments
- There is a cyclist, recently retired who raced as a Junior in 1997, and is known as 'The Goat'. Downhill legend, Greg Minnaar......wipperman9530-12-2024
- The road bias of this site shows up as PFP isn't mentioned - who is as successful as Vos, and from memory has more World titles.wipperman9530-12-2024
- his wife was surprisingly accurateabstractengineer30-12-2024
- Its the wrong thing to do the Vuelta after getting exhausted in the TDF. This is going to reduce his career potentialabstractengineer30-12-2024
- And you missed that I wasn’t contradicting but enhancing or adding to the discussion :-) I am surprised MJ made it that far without some of this having been picked up earlier. To further make my point, yes, by all means correct/improve anything that you can later in life but like disease, think of prevention before asking for cures, even in cycling a lot is crucial at the early stages but unfortunately, unlike athletics, cycling is a sport that rarely takes (youth) coaching seriously, if at all, it’s basically each to himself and we’ll pick the better ones once there’s enough development. About the only thing young cyclists get forced to learn is to ride with high cadence and that isn’t even coach induced but almost institutionalised. And as I tried to imply, no matter how much you perfect technique, we are all absolutely unique in our mechanical motions, you just have to watch the posture and strides of runners to note how dissimilar each is, and a crucial point to always remember is that by trying to force a better technique you may gain something somewhere but lose more elsewhere, you have to know whether it leaves you « comfortably within your natural boundaries « , eg, no point to improve your saddle position for more aerodynamicity if you’re going to have to ride uncomfortably for hours coz your mental state will drag more on your performance than your aerodynamics gain.Mistermaumau30-12-2024
- this isn’t really a discussion about cycling anymore, but that’s cool. so, i live in the united states. there are a lot of things that i don’t like about the way things work or fail to work here, especially compared to many other developed democracies. but one thing the united states does do well is it secures an extraordinarily high level of free speech. now, am i disgusted by the likes of alex jones and how he USES that freedom of speech? you bet. and there are infinite examples of people saying things i’m disgusted and outraged by. but unless someone is going to hand over control to censorOCexile30-12-2024
- I feel you missed my point - those who can be coached and can change can improve with new insights. And it helps to have people who see what needs to change to move that along. I’m focusing on the biomechanical expert in the article, without whom Jorgensen wouldn’t have improved. Context matters.RidesHills30-12-2024
- Yes, but also what eyes can’t do. I was an athletics coach for kids for years and you can see and try to correct as many faults as there are but some requirements are just not possible. It’s very hard to visualize but we all know from experiences, in sport, the most obvious one is the swimming conundrum, you can never become a top level swimmer unless your body grew into it young, maybe gymnastics would be similar. And outside sport, it’s as easy as learning to twitch your ear, if you can ;-)Mistermaumau30-12-2024
- Look, I respect your view but you need to question them out of principle too so I’m going to ask you to ask yourself the same question as someone else, should a living Adolf have been given a platform for discussing war tactics? Should Alex Jones have been allowed to continue his Sandy Hook accusations? Somewhere along a scale society has to draw lines, individuals in their head don’t but the internet is open, it’s society, those who want to exchange non-compatible societal IDEAS can still do so, in private amongst themselves but not market them publicly. Besides wasn’t it part of the deal he was not to be involved in cycling? A public show about cycling seems to fly in the face of that but I guess as so often, it was a poorly worded « contract » and with a lack of morals, limits were bound to be tested, again ;-)Mistermaumau30-12-2024
- Well, perhaps we still consider sport* to be more of a men’s thing? * I have to say that watching my partner at her badminton club that seems to be one of the rare sports where a more balanced attitude is ambivalent, perhaps because most prefer to play mixed doubles at that level and it’s a very social sport at club level and each match type has equal weighting towards a tournament total?Mistermaumau30-12-2024