Warren Barguil has said that the crash which saw riders from the Giant Alpecin team hit by a car could have killed them.
Six Giant-Alpecin riders in Warren Barguil, John Degenkolb, Fredrik Ludvigsson, Ramon Sinkeldam, Max Walscheid and Chad Haga were on a training ride in Calpe, Spain last weekend, when a car being driven by a 73 year old British woman, crashed into them.
The woman was arrested and charged with reckless driving.
“We were riding back to our hotel. I was taking a turn on the front, and at that moment, a car 300 metres up the road was taking a corner. I thought it was going too fast since it was in the left hand lane,” Barguil said to Ouest France. “It wasn’t that it was going too fast, but it was driving regularly and stayed in the left-hand lane.
“The car didn’t stop, it kept going straight on. She [the driver] braked at the point of the first impact. I was riding at 47kph, she was going at 50kph… There was no verge at the roadside, just rocks. I swung as far to the right as I could before the collision.”
“It was quite shocking. We were on the ground for a long time,” he said. “Only one of us managed to avoid the car, and it was he who called the emergency services. He took an arm warmer and used that to make a sling for one of the riders. It wasn’t easy, it was really chaos.”
“For the first two or three days, we joked more after the accident, we downplayed it because we had been through that drama. I told myself I had to be positive,” Barguil said. “But since yesterday [Tuesday], I’m starting to realise we could all have died. And when I think that, it sends a shiver down my spine."
Chad Haga is still in hospital with an orbital fracture whilst John Degenkolb will have to miss the Spring Classics due to his injuries.