Special envoy to Combloux
On Sunday, Sepp Kuss (Jumbo-Visma) was knocked down by a spectator who held out his arm to take a selfie and the American lost his balance, triggering a pile-up which sent two dozen runners to the ground including two teammates . A misadventure which angered the leaders of the Dutch team, indicating that they were considering filing a complaint against the culprit who was identified by the gendarmerie. “The team could do it. We will know how and when,” the yellow jersey team told Reuters. According to our information, ASO, the organizer of the Tour de France, does not plan to file a complaint.
On July 8, Steff Cras (TotalEnergies, 13th in the general classification) was forced to retire after a fall caused by a man who was too advanced on the road. “I hope you really feel guilty. I have to give up the Tour de France because of you”, had reacted on social networks the Belgian who had no intention of going to court.
The next day, Lilian Calmejane (Intermarché) fell after hanging a clothes rack held up by a spectator with his bike. But he had been able to get back on the road after having thrown a big anger against the individual.
Brandishing the threat of a complaint as the Jumbo-Visma team does is anything but a novelty on the Tour de France. In 1975, already, Eddy Merckx had been deliberately and violently attacked by an unconscious spectator who had punched in the liver of the “Cannibal” in the rise of Puy-de-Dôme. Once the finish line was crossed, the latter did not hesitate to go down to go and explain himself to his attacker, sheepish and limply claiming not to have touched him. Merckx had taken the action to court and the man had only been sentenced to a symbolic franc.
Much more recently, in 2021, a spectator holding up a sign and turning her back on the peloton spinning at high speed had been the cause of a great collective fall. The German Tony Martin, the first to fall, had dragged down many other cyclists in his fall. Several riders had been forced to retire, including the German Jasha Sütterlin (DSM) and the Spaniard Marc Soler (Movistar). The organizer Amaury Sport Organization had initially filed a complaint before dropping its charges, but the woman in her thirties had been sentenced on December 9, 2021 to a fine of 1,200 euros by the criminal court of Brest and the payment of a symbolic euro to the National Union of Professional Cyclists (UNCP), civil party. During his trial on October 14, the prosecution had requested a symbolic four-month suspended prison sentence.
In an article published by Liberation in 2018, we learn that the sanctions against a spectator who caused the fall and possibly the injury of an athlete can be of three types: disciplinary, civil if the victim has suffered damage economic because of his fall and finally penal, the heaviest if ever a runner was physically injured.
But the Tour de France teams want to avoid going to court at all costs to ensure that the event remains a celebration. They all urged viewers to be more careful. The Cofidis team said in a statement that the public ‘doesn’t need a mobile phone to create memories’. Egan Bernal, the 2019 champion, was one of the runners taken down in the crash and his Ineos Grenadiers team called on spectators to “give runners room to run”.
