Romain Bardet waved in apology as he walked gingerly past a group of waiting reporters and climbed slowly aboard the AG2R La Mondiale bus after stage 2 of the Tour de France in Liège. The Frenchman’s bloodied knee told the tale of his crash 30 kilometres from the finish, but the half-smile suggested that it was but a flesh wound, albeit one he could have done without.
There is rarely a dull day on the Tour, not even beneath a grey sky slung so low over the Belgium-Germany border it could have been borrowed from a Jacques Brel song, and a seemingly routine stage was shaken into life by a mass crash at the head of the peloton on the outskirts of Battice.
Bardet, second in last year's Tour, was among the fallers, as was the man who beat him, Chris Froome (Sky), and the television cameras focused on their efforts to remount and re-join the body of the peloton as rain fell heavily over the race.
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At Paris-Nice in March, Bardet was ejected from the race for taking a tow from a team car following a crash in the finale of the opening stage, and he seemed to take additional care to avoid the slipstreams of cars in the race convoy as he chased back on in the company of a group of his teammates.
Bardet – and Froome – finished the stage safely in the main body of the peloton as Marcel Kittel (Quick-Step Floors) sprinted to victory on the Quai des Ardennes. Bardet lies 56th in the general classification, 51 seconds behind the maillot jaune Geraint Thomas (Sky) and 39 seconds down on Froome.
"He hit his right knee when he went down and the doctor is checking him out now," Ag2r La Mondiale directeur sportif Julien Jurdie told the reporters grouped outside the team bus. Such are the perpetual risks of the Tour's ever more anxious opening act. "When it's nervous and wet, these things can happen. There's permanent danger on the Tour de France."
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