Christian Vande Velde had just finished reconnoitering next week’s team time trial stage of the Tour de France.
The temperature had been above 100 degrees, and the winding, narrow roads of the course in Montpellier, France, were tricky and challenging.
As Vande Velde described those unpleasant conditions over the telephone a couple of days ago, he made it sound all good.
Who wouldn’t feel that way in the aftermath of a crash so bad it had left all kinds of thoughts in Vande Velde’s head during the ambulance ride that had taken him to an Italian emergency room?
He noticed bones moving in his back and wondered what that meant. He started thinking about what he would do to support his wife and two young daughters if competitive cycling was out of his future. He hoped — vainly, it turned out — that his family had not seen his May 11 accident in the Tour of Italy on television.
“Any crash that significant, you have questions and fears,” he said.
The fears were still there a month later, when his three fractured vertebrae, two fractured ribs and fractured pelvis had healed well enough for Vande Velde, 33, to race a bicycle again, which he had originally not planned to do between the May 31 end of the Tour of Italy and Saturday’s start of the Tour de France.
But the cyclist from Lemont would go 3 1/2 weeks without serious training after the crash. He found himself getting wound tighter and tighter as he sat at his European home in Girona, Spain, and endured the telecast of a race he was supposed to be riding. There were times when he thought it was pretty silly to keep paying strict attention to what he ate if he wouldn’t be able to ride the Tour de France.
“Some days, Haagen-Dazs and beer seemed like a pretty good idea,” he said.
Vande Velde stuck to his diet but knew he needed a race before the Tour de France to regain his fitness. The best choice was the Tour of Switzerland, with nine stages and plenty of climbs in its 841-mile course.
So there he was in Davos, Switzerland, for the race’s first real stage, a 90-mile loop beginning with a 15-mile descent so steep it would produce speeds between 50 and 70 m.p.h. It left Vande Velde thinking he might need a change of underwear, a thought he expressed rather more scatologically.
“It was scary,” he said. “I still wasn’t 100 percent, and right off we are going over 60 miles per hour.”
And a day later, in a rain-slicked tunnel, he was part of a crash that brought down nearly half the field.
This time, the only problem was catching up to his bike, which had slid a couple of hundred yards down the tunnel. Vande Velde climbed on for the rest of yet another breakneck descent and finished not only the stage but the race.
“You get over it, and you relax, because you are happy to be able to race again,” Vande Velde said. “Cycling is not a high-impact sport, so as long as your legs can go around and your hips aren’t damaged, you can ride a bike pretty well.”
He feels ready to do that again in the Tour de France, having quietly become one of its biggest stories a year ago. Vande Velde placed fifth — it became fourth after the fourth finisher was busted for doping — and might have made the podium but for time lost in a crash (what else?) five stages from the finish.
He had spent years as a domestique, or support rider, for team leaders that included Lance Armstrong in his first Tour de France triumph a decade ago. Vande Velde had finished 85th in 1999, 56th in 2004, 24th in 2006 and 25th in 2007.
Last year, he became the man on the Garmin-Chipotle (now Garmin-Slipstream) team. Of even more importance, Vande Velde finally realized he could keep up with the race’s other team leaders.
“I was looking around at people who I always put on a pedestal, and I was right with them,” Vande Velde said in an interview at the Beijing Olympics, where he took 17th in a brutally hot, humid road race that 53 of the 143 starters did not finish.
Armstrong, who stood atop the pedestal seven straight times before presumably retiring after the 2005 Tour de France, is the man everyone will be looking at again after coming back this year.
Armstrong professes himself ready to ride in support of Astana teammate Alberto Contador of Spain, the 2007 Tour winner. But Armstrong’s strong riding in the final week of the Tour of Italy, where he finished 12th, has led at least one cycling expert to predict a podium finish for him.
He may have to battle Vande Velde for it.
“Before the accident, I was shooting for the podium,” Vande Velde said. “I’m going to race as hard as we can, and we’ll see, but I’m not downplaying myself too much.”
It’s just like what they tell you as a kid. You fall, and you get right back on the bike.
But usually not at 60 m.p.h.
“This sport isn’t sane all the time,” he said.
———-
phersh@tribune.com
