There was nothing manufactured in the drama of Domenico Pozzovivo’s Stage 3 crash that saw the Italian narrowly, and very fortunately, escape with his life. With blood trailing across the road to Sestri Levante, a space blanket thrown over his body by desperate paramedics, and a stillness in the scene around, this was truly a heart in mouth moment. Fortunately for Pozzovivo, the extent of his injuries, was all things considered, relatively minor. But for some nasty facial abrasions that will make the Italian a sorry sight around the dinner table for the next few weeks, he appears, to have skirted major head and neck injuries. He appears alright.

But, cycling has moments like these all too often. A rawness that you can’t really find in other sport, bar, perhaps the extreme and the absurd, where the throwaway ‘life and death’ line isn’t just some cliché invoked for the hype, but the reality of a sport that is regularly the embodiment of the brutal. Athletes’ lives have hung in the balance in cycling. Athletes have died in races. The last, Wouter Weylandt, at the 2011 Giro d’Italia, in largely innocuous circumstances. A tragedy all the more pronounced in that it seems utterly open to be repeated.

What other sport can boast its athletes endure into some sort of hellish state of atrophy as they complete a three-week Grand Tour? What other sport would see someone will themselves to carry on after being thrown into a barbed-wire fence at speed by an errant broadcast vehicle, as Johnny Hoogerland did at the 2011 Tour de France, or like Danielle Colli earlier this week, have their arm wrenched into such nauseatingly unwieldy positions, by a mistake, not of his own, but of some overzealous spectator. What other sport would accept it all too, as ‘just the kind of thing that can happen’?

By the same token, you can’t help but reserve a certain respect for Alberto Contador, who like Colli was caught in the mass pile-up on Stage 5, and will soldier on throughout this year’s Giro d’Italia despite dislocating his shoulder, and reportedly going through periods on the lengthy stage Friday to Fiuggi, where even well-braced, he couldn’t escape sharp, and enduring pain. If he can shoulder the pain, Contador, could well still win the Giro d’Italia. And if the Spaniard is looking for inspiration to steel himself, he would do well to read up on the 1956 Giro d’Italia, in which Fiorenzo Magni, having broken his left collarbone, went on to finish second overall.



In one of madder stories in cycling history, and that’s saying something, Magni, who after crashing couldn’t put pressure on his left hand, used an inner tube tied to his handlebars and braced between his teeth for extra leverage. And but for one of the most legendary breakaways of all time by Charly Gaul, Magni may well have won the race. More recently, an admittedly drug-fuelled Tyler Hamilton, fractured his collarbone in the 2003 Tour de France’s opening stage before remarkably finishing fourth overall, while even Contador himself staged a ‘miracle’ recovery last year ahead of the Vuelta a Espana to win the race after fracturing his tibia.

Food for thought anyway for those that label the lycra-clad with those stereo-typical homophobic slurs of ‘softness’. Cycling, and the athletes taking part in this year’s Giro d’Italia, are anything but.

The 98th Giro d’Italia finishes in Milan, June 1.