SPOILER San Sebastian

dish_dash

Eish. Not good. Hope he has a full recovery

Vino'sGhost

DeadCalm wrote:

iainf72 wrote:

Bernal update

http://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id ... d-recovery

Jeez. That sounds a lot worse than I'd imagined.

Get well soon Egan.

not good at all. I hope sky can afford a better dentist than Dan Martin

DeVlaeminck

larkim wrote:

It's always going to about effect though. There'd be no point in introducing mandatory punishments for doing something which "might" have caused an issue (unlike road traffic violations, where reading a text message doesn't need to cause an accident to be punishable).

Personally I'm more tolerant of "racing incidents" when the battle is on - whilst we (and the commissaires) expect riders to be thoughtful and lucid when the pace is up or sprints are on, I'm not always convinced it is that reasonable (though pros do talk about the slow motion effect when they're in that zone, which implies they have more control over their actions and reactions than it might seem reasonable to expect), my beef about the fall in the peloton on Saturday was that it came at a time when the pressure wasn't on quite as much, so there was time for any reasonable observer to judge that spending too much time looking over your shoulder and not watching where you were going could reasonably be expected to significantly reduce the riders ability to respond to something going pear-shaped. Add to that his drift to the rider's right (coupled with the drift of the rider in front to the left) and it was an accident with serious consequences that just shouldn't have happened. If there had been no casualties beyond a bit of road rash, I could agree with the peloton self-policing it, but the impact it had IMHO would justify some sanction or investigation. Other sports-persons have been taken through civil courts for damages for reckless or careless acts on the field of play which have caused serious injury, and whilst I don't think this incident would pass that sort of test, it could yet be the case that the injuries sustained are career threatening.

Can you imagine the future of amateur road racing if the courts started getting involved in racing incidents.

If you ride in a bunch you accept that accidents happen - don't like it don't ride in a bunch and if you are a pro find another job. Sorry if that sounds harsh but that is road racing.

I've suffered a head injury (I don't mean a bit of a graze I mean 40 plus stitches in my face, medium term balance problems, headaches and fatigue and long term very slight tinnitus) myself due to some novice on a chaingang who couldn't negotiate a simple corner so I'm not belittling the injury but it's just the nature of the sport.

larkim

Like it or not, the courts can very easily get involved in amateur sport. In broad terms, there's no real legal opportunity for someone injured in a sporting past-time to say they had accepted the risk of personal injury and had opted out of their normal legal rights.

The fact that it is rare for sporting injuries to make it into the courts is to a large extent due to the fact that a) the NHS exists and b) if you lose the ability to work through a sporting injury in competition you may be covered by insurance. Plus it is often genuinely difficult to pin the negligent blame on one individual or party. A quick google brings up this as something of an overview - https://www.harpermacleod.co.uk/hm-insi ... ing-world/