"Will I ever be able to race at a high level again?" - Cofidis rider Damien Touzé on life-threatening crash and bikes that feel like 'a piece of wood'

Damien Touzé, a rider for Cofidis who took part in the Tour de France last summer, may be forced to end his career following a crash at the Tour of Oman. The French rider sustained very serious injuries which have not only kept him in the Middle East for an extensive period of time; but also an intestine perforation that is keeping him in the hospital over two weeks after the crash. The former World Tour rider shares serious concerns also over the speeds that the peloton races at currently and how it affects the gravity of the crashes.

Touzé start off his 2026 season at the Clàssica Comunitat Valenciana and then made the trip to Oman in early February to race the Muscat Classic and Tour of Oman. During stage 4, he crashed at high speed, suffering a fractured femur, ruptured spleen and several injuries in his legs as a result of hitting a guardrail at high speed.

However perhaps the worst of the injuries was only diagnosed after he was given permission to leave the hospital in Oman and return to Europe. “At first they didn’t realize I had a hole in my intestine. They hadn’t closed the abdominal wall; it was like I’d been torn open," Touzé said in an interview with Ouest-France.

The story might not have a happy ending. The 29-year old's injuries might be too severe to allow him to return to professional cycling: “Will I ever be able to race at a high level again? We don’t know that yet," he admit to the microphone of RTBF.

It is a time of uncertainty for another pro rider who is suffering the consequences of a peloton that is increasingly seeing more and more high-speed crashes, with high consequences. Virtually every rider at the very top, at this point, has suffered a grave injury in recent years; and the same continues to happen to riders at all levels of professional cycling.

Touzé is not oblivious to the increase in risks for doing the same job in the peloton. "In recent years, the number of crashes in these races — which are normally the safest — has increased. The tension is really intense, and since the start of the year we’ve seen at least one big crash in every race," he argues.

The five-time Grand Tour participant also believes that the technological evolution of the bikes in the peloton is seeing the riders race at such an increasingly high speed that the falls are inevitably going to have bigger consequences simultaneously:

"The bikes… I feel like they don’t suit us anymore. They’re like a piece of wood. You can easily ride 60 km/h on the flat, boxed in behind someone’s wheel. So the slightest impact you get becomes a hundred times bigger for us".