Nasty crash on descent costs Dan Martin dearly at Tour Alps | Video
Posted on: April 22nd, 2021
Dan Martin was in with a chance of a stage win, not to mention consolidating his general classification position, in the closing stages of the Tour of the Alps today only to crash on a descent.
The Irish rider overcooked a hairpin while descending the last climb of the day, with just over 5km to go to the finish, and fell awkwardly before taking some time to right himself and get going again.
The upshot was he went from being within seconds of the two leaders to losing three minutes to them by the time he reached the finish line on today’s stage 4 after 168.6km of racing from Naturns to Pieve di Bono.
Nicolas Roche (Team DSM) had flown the Irish flag earlier in the stage when he went on the attack in the main breakaway, with Chris Froome (Israel Start-Up Nation) among those he was with, and we will have more on Roche’s exploits later.
However, that breakaway group was reeled in thanks to the efforts of the BikeExchange team of race leader Simon Yates. And when what remained of the peloton hit the final climb the field split to pieces.
Yates pushed ahead with Aleksandr Vlasov (Astana) and they were leading as they descended the climb, with Martin and Pello Bilbao (Bahrain-Victorious) proving best of the rest on the tough climb that saw 2nd placed overall Pavel Sivakov (Ineos Grenadiers) get dropped.
However, with only 9 seconds separating leaders Yates and Vlasov from Martin and Bilbao with just over 5km to go, disaster struck for Martin when he crashed. To rub salt into the wounds, Bilbao managed to catch Yates and Vlasov and won the stage.
Dan Martin finally limped home in a small group in 23rd place and 2:53 down on Bilbao, Yates and Vlasov. That means he slipped from 4th overall this morning with Bilbao to 14th overall some 4:01 down on Yates.
However, the main thing for Martin is that he was able to finish and hopefully has not caused himself any lasting injury as his form appears to be very good with the Giro d’Italia approaching.
After his earlier breakaway efforts, Nicolas Roche – who has looked strong in recent days – finished some 17:57 down and was in 54th place. Yates now leads overall by 58 seconds from Bilbao, with Vlasov in 3rd at 1:06, with just one stage remaining.
