Van Vleuten led with less than 11km to go, but crashed dramatically on the descent which had ended men’s road race leader Vincenzo Nibali’s chances 24 hours earlier.
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Dutch cycling team manager Johan Lammerts told USA Today that Van Vleuten was unconscious “for a considerable period of time” but regained consciousness before being loaded into an ambulance.
The 33 year-old played down her injuries when she took to Twitter later Sunday to reassure her followers she was “fine” and expressed her disappointment at crashing out of the most significant race of her career to date.
“She has severe concussion and three small fracture particles in her lumbar spine”.
Despite Van der Breggen winning, the race was marred by a horrific looking crash for Van Vleuten. She regained consciousness before being loaded into an ambulance to be taken to a local hospital, and she was talking.
Annemiek van Vleuten was leading the race for gold when her tires appeared to skid out from underneath her.
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The Dutch road racing cyclist Van Vleuten was born October 8,2016, is also riding for Orica-AIS.
The crash happened on the Vista Chinesa, the same descent where the leaders of the men’s race were wiped out on Saturday.
Van der Breggen had trouble keeping her concentration after the crash.
Leslie-Pelecky said that, based on the video, it looked like van Vleuten’s crash started when her front wheel crossed the painted line on the road. I looked at that road furniture and thought, nobody can crash here and just get up. “I thought she was dead”, Van der Breggen said after seeing her team-mate lying in the road.
Armitstead added she had support from her fellow riders within the peloton. In 2011, she won the UCI Women’s Road World Cup.
Where she probably went wrong was not knowing how to ride a bike.
She nearly did not get to compete in Rio after missing three doping tests over the previous year, but she successfully challenged one of them in the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Plus this has been a very public wheel of pain for an athlete who loves her sport, whose life has been measured by sacrifice and competitive anxiety since she was plucked out by British cycling, aged 10 Everything she has achieved will now come with an asterisk.
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The CyclingTips and Ella teams wish Annemiek all the best for a full and speedy recovery.
