Tour de France: Chris Froome survives scare as Tour is plunged into chaos of an utterly unknown order

Froome finally completed the course on a replacement bike and having provisionally lost the yellow jersey on the Ventoux summit question he was later re-awarded the lead

Chris Froome is forced to take measures into his own hands at stage 12 (Getty)

The Tour de France was plunged into chaos of an utterly unknown order yesterday when Chris Froome, the race leader, was entangled in a late crash and forced to run up part of the Mont Ventoux climb without a bike.

Froome finally completed the course on a replacement bike and having provisionally lost the yellow jersey on the Ventoux summit question he was later re-awarded the lead. The distance he run was estimated at not more than 200 metres of a ten kilometre climb. But the questions raised by such a bizarre series of incidents will reverberate through the sport for months to come.

The Tour has been run into serious trouble in the past when it has been halted briefly by riders’ strikes in the past. It came within a hairs-breadth of ending a week early in 1998 when nearly a third of the peloton withdrew in protest against police raids.

But yesterday’s scenario, and the questions it raises, was of a different nature altogether. For the first time in the race’s 113-year-history, a Tour leader was unable to use his bike after a crash and was forced to run uphill in order to try to limit the gaps as much as possible.

The crash itself was caused, apparently, by spectators spilling over into the road and tv motorbikes then getting forced to slow to a near halt to avoid running them over. This meant Froome’s rival Richie Porte slammed into one and then as Froome slammed on the brakes, another motorbike struck the Briton from behind. All three of the riders involved,

Richie Porte, Chris Froome and Dutch rider Bauke Mollema were initially unable to continue, but Froome was the only one with a broken bike. At which point Froome had only one option: run.

There have been incidents involving the Tour’s leader and spectators before that have, indirectly, affected the outcome of the race, but they are thankfully comparatively rare. The most notorious affected Eddy Merckx, in 1975,who was battling for the Tour for a record-breaking sixth time when he was punched in a stomach by a French fan. Merckx would later claim the blow would cost him the Tour, which he never won again.

But if Merckx could continue pedalling, for Froome that was - if briefly - not the case. In images bordering on the surreal, after his brief run, Froome finally remounted one bike provided by a neutral service repair vehicle some 400 metres from the line. But it was too small and he had to wait for another. The gap created - 1 minute and 40 seconds - meant he initially lost the leader’s jersey according to provisional results, although finally he was re-awarded it.

That the whole incident happened just when Froome was attacking and had dropped his main rivals barring Porte and Mollema only rubs in how surreal and farcical the situation had become.

Speaking after they had been re-awarded the yellow jersey, Team Sky boss Sir Dave Brailsford played down the incident, saying “nobody tried to do it, it was unintentional and we should stay calm and not over-react.”

The density of the crowds on the Ventoux was perhaps exacerbated by the organiser’s decision to curtail the length of the climb - ironically enough, in order to try and improve rider security - in the face of galeforce winds reaching 140 kmh overnight on the Ventoux.

Barriers usually start in two kileomtres from the finish, but with the sudden change of plan this was apparently not possible. However, the proximity of fans to the riders is an issue which has caused some worrying near misses in the past in cycling. The sight of fans running next to the riders, particularly as they go uphill, urging them on, or only moving apart at the very last moment is regrettably a very frequent one.

Froome himself gave a hearty shove one Colombian fan who came too close on one stage in the Pyrenees, for which the Briton received a fine of 200 Swiss Francs. Froome later apologized for the incident. But on this occasion, this was not a direct collision between riders and fans that caused him to grind to a halt.

Riders agreed that such an event should not have caused Froome to lose the jersey, with Adam Yates, the Bury-born pro who was briefly named as provisional leader, saying he would “not have wanted the yellow in a way like that.” As Yates points out “it was pretty dangerous but the fans make the sport, it’s not many sports that they can get that close.”

But yesterday’s events re-open the question of how to run a world level event in a scenario which is largely open to the public except for its starts and finishes, in the most dramaticfashion possible.