Dutch rider Lars Boom won a chaotic, crash-marred fifth stage of the Tour de France on Wednesday marked by the withdrawal of defending champion Chris Froome after his second fall in two days.
Riders became wary of the stage full of cobblestone sections when the route was revealed last October and their fears worsened when rain slicked the already treacherous path from Ypres, Belgium, to Arenberg-Porte du Hainaut.
Sensing the danger, race organisers scrapped two of the nine scheduled cobblestone patches and reduced the stage by three kilometres. But that still was not enough to stop many riders from tumbling.
Froome, already nursing pain in his left wrist from a crash on Tuesday, took a spill even before the cobblestones halfway through the stage. With a cut under his right eye, the Team Sky leader limped over to a team car, climbed in, and quit a three-week race that became wide open.
Froome wrote on Twitter: “Devastated to have to withdraw from this years TDF. Injured wrist and tough conditions made controlling my bike near to impossible.”
The last time a defending champion abandoned the Tour was five-time winner Bernard Hinault of France in 1980, according to French cycling statistics provider Velobs.com.
Sir Bradley Wiggins backed his Team Sky colleague Froome to bounce back from his withdrawal.
Wiggins crashed out of the 2011 Tour with a broken collarbone in the first week before responding to become the race’s first British winner a year later.
Wiggins, speaking via his agent, said: “It’s a tough day. I never like to see a great racer go down but Chris will be back.
“Today has showed how hard it is to win the Tour de France, but the team will have prepared for this and they’ll deal with it.”
Race leader Vincenzo Nibali was one of several high-profile riders who crashed, recovered and excelled on the 152.5km route. The Italian finished third and extended his lead. He and second-placed Jakob Fuglsang of Denmark were 19 seconds behind Boom.
“This is a special, special day for me,” said Boom, who rides for Belkin Pro Cycling.
“I was really looking forward to the cobblestones.”
Overall, Nibali leads his Astana teammate Fuglsgang by two seconds.
Cannondale rider Peter Sagan was third, 44 seconds back. Two-time Tour champion Alberto Contador was distanced on the first cobblestone patch and lost about two-and-a-half minutes to Nibali; he is 2:37 back, in 19th place.
Others who went down but kept going included Americans Andrew Talansky and Tejay van Garderen, Jurgen van den Broeck of Belgium, and Alejandro Valverde of Spain.
Marcel Kittel, winner of three of the race’s first four stages, crashed too, but recovered.
While the chaos on the course raised questions about riding in such poor conditions – and critics in social media had a field day – it made for great racing imagery.
Many riders were caked in wet mud and many looked as if they had ridden through a shower of chocolate pudding.
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