Originally Posted by
Spaghetti Legs
(...)
My older son had a blast!
.... as did about 17 million Dutch watching that same rider.
Talk about epic rides.
His name is Johnny Hoogerland, and he'd been driven off the road by a TV crew car in 9th stage of that TdF and landed in a barbed wire fence.
Such an accident would probably have ended anyone else's race, but he got back on the bike, got 33 stitches later that night and proclaimed that "a Zealander doesn't give up that easily". He became a national hero, and I'm sure the Dutch Curve was rooting for him that day on Alpe d'Huez.
That same afternoon on the podium:
