Cycling UK Forum

Road defect causes crash in OVO race

https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/17703 ... ar-didcot/

Looks pretty certain to me. You can see a shadow under the wheels just as the race passes the cattery. In wet conditions that is just fatal.

Video: https://twitter.com/thepuncheur/status/ ... 3066561536
The pothole: https://goo.gl/maps/NgfTtNCvcWKxBjms7

The other notable aspect of the crash is that her teammate and the lead out rider immediately in front of her, appears to sufferer a handlebar failure after hitting the pothole.

Vos indicated in an interview after she'd abandoned that she also hit the same pothole.

Oxford Mail does a good follow up job proving pot hole is still there:
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/17707 ... voss-race/

Note race organisers and council denied that a pot hole caused the crash. So this is a very good case example of how inspection needs to be radically improved. IMHO this should be automated and would be a good first use of autonomous vehicles to do this job and remove human error.

I've just remembered that on one occasion, it was said that Max Sciandri lost the sprint in one edition of the Leeds Classic partly through hitting a pothole a couple of hundred yards out. It's not mentioned in the race reports so it may be an urban (chain gang?) myth.

http://autobus.cyclingnews.com/results/ ... eeds1.html

Any road up, the now "iconic location" of the finishing straight on the Headrow outside Leeds Town Hall always looks smooth for the Tour de Yorkshire.

I read from two different sources via Twitter that Vos was back out on her bike Friday.

Not surprisingly both the race organisers and Oxfordshire C.C. are denying that the pothole played any part in the crash but it seems highly likely to me that it did. I was watching the highlights on TV and the pothole was definitely mentioned in commentary. Also as I said before Marianne Vos issued a statement afterwards indicating that she had been unable to avoid the pothole. “A dent in the road” were her actual words IIRC.


Vos may well have hit the pothole but looking at the video it was mostly her teammate crashing in front of her that caused her to crash. As I said earlier her teammate appears to suffer a bike failure of some sort after hitting the pothole. I speculated earlier about a handlebar failure because this was also mentioned in the TV commentary. It's not clear from the video what actually breaks but it does look like a front end failure of some kind, and the type of bike failure we all fear most. Thankfully there were no serious injuries.

The above serious points aside, I think worth saying that getting this race longer and hillier has improved it considerably. Earlier editions were somewhat hamstrung by logistical limitations but its really starting to come in to its own now. Pothole inspection team perhaps excepted, Chapeau! to all involved.

Pete.

I watched the coverage a few times and couldn't see the bike actually hit the pothole, but assuming it did, it looked to me like the rider lost grip of the bars and fell forwards, didn't notice anything wrong with the bike but didn't actually look. It's easy to be caught out by a bump you aren't expecting on an otherwise smooth road.