But on the treacherous descent, her back wheel came out and what happened next was a crash that had serious implications for Van Vleuten as she suffered concussion and three fractures to her spine. Her front tire then appeared to lock up, stopping the bike in its tracks and sending van Vleuten into a curb.
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RIO DE JANEIRO -Cycling’s governing body the UCI said the Olympic course was not to blame for a series of bone-crunching crashes during the weekend’s road races around Rio’s stunning coastline.
But unfortunately GB fell outside of the medals on both occassions as Geraint Thomas crashed on the risky descent of the Vista Chinesa circuit on Saturday, and on Sunday Armitstead finished fifth in what was an absorbing race.
Van Vleuten, who lost consciousness for a time, said late on Sunday that she would be “fine”.
Former Olympic individual pursuit champion Chris Boardman told the BBC the course was unsafe.
“We do our utmost to design safe, challenging courses but unfortunately crashes do sometimes occur due to a combination of factors”.
“I am past commenting – I am angry about it”, Boardman said during his commentating duties for the BBC. We knew it was way past being technical; it was unsafe.
“We saw Annemiek at the side of the road; it was very odd because it just looked not good”, the gold medalist said, according to the Guardian.
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“After the men’s race, . we were all warned that we need to take care of that descent”, van der Breggen said. Afterwards Emma [Johanssen, Sweden] said – just do it for Annemiek and I thought – yeah, that’s right. “It is really bad and that is what we have seen”. We saw that Mara Abbott (of the United States) was getting weaker and we gave it our all. Fortunatley, she was able to tweet an update to concerned viewers. “Waiting for some research&hope I can leave today. Knowing that this chance is 1 in 4 years, doesn’t make it easy”.
