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Belgian Philippe Gilbert, who suffers a fracture of the kneecap right after a crash in the first stage of the Tour on Saturday, he will not continue in the race, announced his team, Lotto, as well as Spain’s Rafael Valls of Bahrain, also due to a crash.
Gilbert, one of the active cyclists with the best track records in the classics, was involved in one of the many crashes that occurred in the first stage, near Nice.
The Belgian was able to finish the stage, but an MRI scan on Saturday night showed the fractured kneecap.
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“I had pain, a pain that I recognized”, noted Gilbert, who left the 2018 Tour for an identical reason after a crash in the Pyrenees.
Another runner, Valls, will not start the second stage either, as he suffered a fracture of the right femur, the Bahrain team said.
For the Lotto he is the second cyclist to lose, after the German John Degenkolb, another of his important men, got out of control in the first stage.
See also: Egan Bernal: “The first week there are always falls, a lot of nerves”
“Today I lost everything. Everything I had worked and trained for in this 2020 special. Caleb Ewan and I, with many riders, suffered a fall, the ground was wet. My Tour de France has been destroyed from day one”, Degenkolb pointed out.
This Sunday the second stage of the Tour is held, 186 kilometers again around Nice but with a more mountainous profile than the first.
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