Italian driver Daniel Oss has retired from the Tour de France with a fractured neck after colliding with a fan in the fifth stage.
Images posted on Twitter show the TotalEnergies star crashing into a desperate fan trying to record a video on his phone as the pilots passed at high speed.
The fan was sent flying to the ground while Oss also crashed off his bike. The Italian managed to get up and cross the finish line at the end of the stage, but his team revealed that the damage is serious.
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But after heading for the scans, his team confirmed that a bone had been fractured in his neck and that he is now scheduled not to play “a few weeks” after retiring from the Tour de France.
“Additional examinations revealed a fracture of a cervical vertebra that required immobilization for a few weeks,” the team wrote on Twitter.
Daniel Oss bumps into a fan trying to record a video. (Twitter)
“So Daniel Oss is forced to leave the Tour de France. The whole team wishes you a good recovery, Daniel.”
Oss was one of three drivers who were unable to get to the starting line in Binche, Belgium, for the sixth stage, with Michael Gogl (Alpecin-Deceuninck) also leaving the race after falling with Oss, suffering a fracture of collarbone and pelvis.
Tadej Pogačar returns with the yellow jersey at the end of the sixth stage. And it’s sooner than maybe he expected.
On the way to his victories in the 2020 and 2021 Tours, Pogačar took the yellow jersey to the mountains, but on Thursday he only needed the modest Côte des Religieuses hill in the border town of Longwy.
Asked about the possibility of returning yellow, which was not confirmed when he spoke, Pogačar said in televised comments that at the moment he was focused on the stage victory and “anything else is just an advantage”.
After an impressive sixth stage of almost 220 kilometers through Belgium and northern France, the longest of this year’s Tour, Pogačar retired on arrival at the sprint on the shield of the Côte des Religieuses for getting his first stage victory this year ahead of David Gaudu and Michael Matthews.
Now Pogačar leads the Tour with four seconds ahead of American driver Neilson Powless, thanks to bonus seconds based on the position of the stage.
“Every time I win it’s even better,” Pogačar said. “The last two climbs were very hard, it was above our thresholds. It was very hard for the final and hectic climb and all. I guess he had good legs to push in the end. “
Wout Van Aert was the leader facing the stage and was the focus of attention with a breakaway, but was caught when 11 kilometers were left for the end. Van Aert fell in the final stretch of the stage and lost more than seven minutes.
It is the first time Pogačar has been shown yellow in the Tour after taking the lead in the 20th stage in 2020 and the eighth stage last year.
Friday marks the first mountain stage of the Tour and a return to a place where the UAE Team Emirates rider made a name for himself. The seventh stage, 176 kilometers, goes from Tomblaine to the top at La Planche des Belles Filles, where he won to take the yellow jersey of his compatriot Primož Roglič in the penultimate stage of 2020.
Despite the imposing length of the stage, the pace was relentlessly fast from the start.
Tadej Pogacar of Slovenia and UAE Team Emirates celebrates victory of yellow leader t-shirt at podium ceremony after 109th Tour de France 2022, stage 6 a 219.9 km stage from Binche to Longwy 377 m / # TDF2022 / #WorldTour / July 7, 2022 in Longwy, France. (Photo by Michael Steele / Getty Images) (Getty)
Van Aert, Quinn Simmons and Jakob Fuglsang separated and had a four-minute difference with the peloton at one point, but gradually recovered. Fuglsang went down and the lead was reduced to two minutes with 50 kilometers to go. Simmons could not keep up with Van Aert, who kept his lead stable for just over a minute with 25 kilometers to go, but the Belgian did not have enough energy to stay ahead in the repeated climbs.
Pogačar said he had thought Van Aert could win the stage on his own and credited his team’s “incredibly good work” to putting him in a position to fight for the stage victory on the uphill finish of the Côte des Religieuses.
Van Aert had led since Saturday’s second stage, with a series of impressive starts and a stage victory along the way. The Belgian will now change his yellow jersey for green as the leader of the sprint classification.
“Sure the yellow t-shirt is prettier than the green one, but I’ve enjoyed the yellow and will also enjoy the green,” he said.
“At the end of the day, there were only three of us in front, so I was very aware that it would be a mission to stay up there until the end. But I wanted to pay tribute to the Maillot Jaune and share the moment with the public ”.
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