Cav causes crash?

Stage 4 of the Tour Du Suisse should have been an excellent opportunity to gauge the form of the top sprinters before the TDF. Instead, it was what can only be described as a big, painful-looking, fuck up.



Or if you're not one for gruesome YouTube footage, here's the beginnings of  that crash in still form - it looks like Cav's front wheel may have hit a patch of quicksand.

From the scale of the carnage, you might be surprised to hear that only Heinrich Haussler, Lloyd Mondory and Arnaud Coyot didn't start today. Coyot broke some bones in his hand and Haussler had a big old cut on his elbow.

Where this leaves my FTDF sprinting selection, I just don't know. It was looking good for Haussler to get a start with the Bile Beans, but this crash could be a lot to deal with so close to the start of the Tour. It seems Cav doesn't have the form he did last year, and after yesterday, his confidence/arrogance might have taken a bit of a knock. He's certainly not popular with Cervelo's Andreas Klier and Jeremy Hunt who delayed the start today with a protest. They're none too happy about what happened to Haussler and they say Cav hasn't apologised. Cav certainly didn't come out unscathed yesterday though.

Cav was fined 30 seconds by the race organisers for irregular sprinting and I'm inclined to agree with them - although Haussler seemed to come off his line a bit too. Armchair-based keyboard warriors have been quick to examine the footage with the kind of detail normally reserved for the Zapruder Film. So, opinions seem to range from the "Cav could see he wasn't going to win, so made everyone crash", to "it was all Haussler's fault". If you ask me, I'd say the blame was about 75% Cav, 25% Haussler.

Unfortunately in the fast-paced world of bunch sprinting this kind of thing happens every now and again, and to be honest, I'm surprised it doesn't happen more often. It does happen though, so lets take a stroll down memory lane to see some of those finish-line pile-ups from yesteryear. The most controversial crash of last 2009 was probably this piece of work by Theo Boss at the Tour of Turkey.



And Cav's exploits reminded me a bit of another erratic fast-man, Djamolodine Abdoujaparov.



Or there was that time a snap-happy Gendarme got in the way on the finishing straight of the Tour back in 1994.



Lets hope we don't see any of this kind of thing going on in the Tour this July, or if we do, that no one involved is in the Bile Beans team.