While you may have forgotten about the existence of the Tour de France, in light of another major international sporting event in the country that has stolen the spotlight as well as the busy sports summer on this side of the pond, this summer’s Tour has seen its fair share of wacky and bizarre occurrences.
Llamas have a decent chance of invading the course tomorrow, a horse did a better job of racing against the field than most of the field did and now there’s this piece of video:
A fan accidentally unplugged the air machine pumping those arches up which signal one kilometer left until the finish line, which then sent the arches down onto the racers themselves.
Never seen this in 30 years of watching the #tdf: 1km to go banner deflates, falls on cyclists pic.twitter.com/4Gq1PDHblk
— Greg Emerson (@emersongreg) July 8, 2016
Those arches are called the Flamme Rouge in French and thanks to this viral clip, I’m sure a lot more people now know of them now. Perhaps this is a crazy guerilla marketing tactic given the arches are sponsored?
“A spectator came too close to the structure and with his belt he caught it on the cable,” said Amaury Sport Organisation’s Philippe Sudres. “The cable powered the generator that powered the arch, the inflatable. We know that from a witness who was there and who talked to the police.” Adam Yates, the racer who was crushed, so to speak, by the arch required four stitches on his chin.
The race leaders at the time were given identical times for their seventh stage runs and finished the stage together, so at this point there doesn’t look to be any effect on the overall Tour standings themselves, but if you were wondering if there was any way for this year’s Tour to get any more bizarre, this would certainly qualify.
