Imagine standing on the side of the road watching the Tour de France. The crowd is cheering as cyclists speed past you. Beside you, there’s a large inflatable banner called the Spider that tells riders that there’s a kilometer to go until the end of the stage. You’re close enough that you can feel the wind from the competitors as they fly by. Adam Yates is powering his way up the road towards you, and the crowd is going wild. Then, quite by accident, you realize that somehow your belt has snagged on a cable that connects the generator to the inflatable. “No big deal,” you think. “I’ll just take a step back.” Then, as you move backwards, you tear the entire thing apart. The cable pulls out, and the giant inflatable collapses directly on Yates’s front tire, sending him flying over the handlebars at almost 50 miles an hour. The pace guy catches a bit of it, too, and then the pack catches up. They’ve been training years for this, and now there’s a giant inflatable piece of plastic all over the road. Yates is stumbling around on the road, looking for his bike and bleeding from the chin. You fucked up, and everyone is watching.
That’s what happened to some poor, unfortunate soul on the sidelines of the Tour de France, cycling’s biggest event. The stage winner, Great Britain’s Steve Cummings, had passed under the Spider a few minutes before it collapsed, along with a few others. Yates, though, the unluckiest of all the riders, took the brunt of the collapse on his front tire, landed directly on his face, then wandered around in a daze before taking a seat on the side of the road.
“It was disappointing but what can you do when that thing falls on you?” said Yates, who eventually got a bunch of stitches to hold his chin together. “I was going at 70-80km per hour, the barrier came down and I had no time to react. It was a good thing I was on my own or it could have been worse.”
Afterwards, he found his bike, climbed on, and made his way to the finish line. Organizers, who were stuck dealing with what to do in a situation like this, decided to take times for the overall standings a few kilometers before the collapse so that all the riders ended up with a fair time. Yates, after his time was revised, gets to don the white jersey when the next stage began, and placed in second overall.
