I was able to watch a few stages of the race and follow the standings througout. Lance Armstrong ended up in 12th place overall. Pretty good out of the hundreds of riders. Levi Leipheimer finished 6th. The top five were all very capable and decorated racers, including the 2008 Tour De France winner, Carlos Sastre.
The final stage was an individual time trial, everyone riding alone, which I usually like to watch, but it was raining and the riders were taking it easy so as not to slip. The race was led by Dennis Menchov of Russia by 31 seconds going into the final stage. As he approached the finish (only about 3 minutes away) this happened: (sorry it's small and you can't see well because of the trees)
There is an even better video on Universal Sports, but I couldn't embed it. The other video is pretty wicked, and it looks like it hurt a lot. He had a big wound on his leg I think too. Anyway, It's really amazing to me, and kind of funny too, how from the second he hits the ground he's maneuvering to get up. And once he gets up, he's running to his bike. It's also crazy how quickly the guy jumps out of his car and gives him a new bike.
All in all, it's only about 10 seconds from when he crashes to when he's on a new bike riding again. In the end, Menchov finished 41 seconds ahead of the 2nd place finisher in the general classification. So, he preserved his victory of the Giro. Another pretty amazing thing is how far he slides on the wet cobblestone. He was going about 50 km/hr when he fell (31 mph). If he had fallen any differently, he could have broken a number of bones. Lucky guy.
Anyway, it was a pretty exciting finish to the race. This man has guts...and a sore hip.
2 comments:
What terrible luck. He wasn't even doing anything. I went to the Universal Sport site and watched their video too. OUCH! Thanks for sharing.
HA! He did slide for quite a while didn't he?
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