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| Chris Froome of Britain ran for a stretch of the Tour after he crashed and his bike was run over by a motorcycle. Jean-Paul Pelissier/Reuters |
VAISON-LA-ROMAINE, France — His bike crushed under a motorcycle’s tires, his Tour de France lead in jeopardy and his rivals pedaling away, Chris Froome did the only thing he could think to do: He ran toward the finish line.
It was a stunning moment in a modern Tour de France: The holder of the race leader’s yellow jersey suddenly turning into a runner, heading up a mountain pass without his bike.
It took an appeal to prevent Froome, a Briton with Team Sky, from losing the race lead.
The chaotic string of events began on Thursday when spectators swarmed over the road about one kilometer from the finish of Stage 12’s truncated climb up Mont Ventoux. They forced a television motorbike to stop suddenly at the same time that Richie Porte, an Australian with the American BMC team, attacked Froome. Some reports said the motorcycle hit a spectator who was blocking the road.
Porte smashed face-first into transmission equipment on the back of the motorbike. Bauke Mollema, who was also with Porte and Froome, cartwheeled into the air. Froome hit the ground on the other side of the motorcycle, out of its camera’s sight, with Mollema ending up on top of him.
Adding to the confusion, a large police motorcycle then ran over Froome’s Pinarello bicycle, breaking it. Immediately on the scene were mechanics who provide service to riders when their team cars are not nearby. But they were traveling by motorcycle and had only spare wheels to offer.
That’s when Froome changed sports. Uncertain about when a team car might arrive with his spare bike, he propped his broken machine against a photographer’s motorcycle and began running.
For about 40 agonizing seconds, he chugged along at a remarkably good pace, considering he was wearing shoes with rigid carbon fiber soles and heading up a steep mountain road.
Porte, after fiddling with his bike, remounted his bike and wobbled past Froome, who kept looking backward for salvation.
Another group of neutral service mechanics appeared in their yellow station wagon and gave Froome one of the rarely used generic bicycles from its roof. It was too small for Froome. Even worse, he was unable to clip into its pedals, which were not compatible with shoe cleats.
One of Froome’s team cars finally arrived, and he changed bikes again. By the time he crossed the line, Froome had lost the yellow jersey, on paper at least, to another British rider, Adam Yates, of the Orica-BikeExchange team. Froome, realizing that was the case, shook his head when he crossed the line.
Cycling’s rule book includes a section that prevents riders from incurring a time penalty if they crash or have a mechanical problem within the final three kilometers of a stage, provided that they eventually make it across the finish line.
But that does not apply to mountain stages like the one on Thursday.
Froome’s team appealed to the race referees, who represent the International Cycling Union, the sport’s governing body, not the Tour organization. They agreed that the unusual circumstance warranted a time adjustment for Froome.
“What a finish, Ventoux is full of surprises,” Froome told France Télévisions as he thanked the jury of referees and the race organization. “I’m very content.”
Yates, if anything, appeared relieved.
“You don’t want to take the yellow jersey like that; you want to take it with your legs,” he said. “He’s the rightful holder of the yellow jersey.”
The incident is likely to increase growing concern among riders about the dangers posed by the 70 motorbikes within the race and the behavior of some fans, many of them apparently less than sober.
Even after the crash, a man with a handwritten sign supporting the Polish climber Rafal Majka repeatedly blocked a television motorbike as it tried to follow Froome’s run.
“If you can’t control the crowds, what can you control?” Porte said. “It’s not really the motorbikes, it’s the crowd. They’re just in your face the whole time, pushing riders, and at the top there, that was just crazy.”
On most days at the Tour, at least in the final kilometer, crowd barriers line the road to the finish line and the police deal severely with fans who attempt to circumvent them.
That was not the case on Thursday because of a decision made the previous night, paradoxically, in the interests of safety. The finish line was moved six kilometers down Mont Ventoux to avoid fearsome winds that were blowing down recreational riders at its rock-strewn summit. On Thursday, the winds flipped over a tourist’s camping trailer near the top.
Christian Prudhomme, the Tour’s director, said wind problems at the revised finish line, on a road in a forested area, prevented crews from putting up the normal number of barriers. He did not offer any apology to the riders when speaking to reporters.
While the failure to control the crowd had an obvious cause, motorcycles are a more thorny issue. Some riders have proposed that they be replaced by scooters. But that idea has only gone only as far as a single mechanical service scooter.
It seems unlikely, however, that scooters could carry the equipment needed for live television transmission or provide adequate speed for the gendarmes who patrol the race route.
Almost lost in all the confusion was the day’s racing. For the first time in this Tour, Nairo Quintana, a Colombian with Movistar, who is seen as a top challenger, attacked Froome on the Ventoux climb.
But he was unable to cause any grief for Froome, who left Quintana behind in the closing moments of the stage. But up to the point of the crash, Froome had been unable to shake Porte, who previously rode for Sky and was Froome’s key assistant in the mountains.
Ahead of the chaos and the impromptu running competition, the stage was won by Thomas De Gendt, a Belgian with Lotto Soudal, who outdistanced another Belgian, Serge Pauwels, of the Dimension Data team. Afterward, they said that they struggled to make it through the crowd that set off the chain reaction that brought down Froome, Porte and Mollema. Neither De Gendt nor Pauwels is a likely threat to win the overall title.
On Friday, the riders will contest the Tour’s first time trial, in which riders individually race against the clock. The event is one of Froome’s specialties.
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