GAP, France — Two bright-yellow Tour de France arrows attached to a telephone pole were telling Geraint Thomas to veer sharp right.
He rode straight into them.
Roadside spectators on the hairpin bend both froze and scattered as the burly Welshman barreled toward them. Braking frantically, one shoe unclipped from his pedals, the right-hand man for race leader Chris Froome tried to shave off speed.
A spectator’s folded plastic chair flew as the racer for Team Sky careened into the pole, shoulder and helmeted-head first. Thomas bounced off it like a tossed rag doll and disappeared over a drop-off into a dark thicket of woods.
“I was all tangled up in the bushes,” he said. “A nice Frenchman pulled me out.”
At least he finished Stage 16 with his sense of humor intact. Asked if he still remembered his name, Thomas jokingly replied: “Chris Froome.”
Had it really been race leader Froome, not Thomas, who crashed on the stage’s hair-raising final descent in the foothills of the Alps, their Team Sky bosses wouldn’t have seen the funny side.
Surviving the tortuous downhill bends raced at speeds of 45 mph or more with his body and race lead still in one piece means that Froome now only has four days of climbing to get through before the British rider sips a flute of champagne Sunday on the Champs-Elysees.
Outwitting Peter Sagan, who took heart-in-the-mouth risks on the descent, Spanish rider Ruben Plaza Molina rode triumphantly into the finish at Gap as the solo winner. Crossing the line, Plaza sucked his right thumb as a wink to his young son.
The Lampre-Merida rider reached the top of the stage’s last climb with about a minute’s lead on Sagan, who rides for Tinkoff-Saxo. As they both sped down, with Sagan gaining, Plaza’s team kept him updated on the time-gap via his earpiece radio.
The crash is a setback to Thomas’ chances of joining Froome on the podium in Paris. At the start of the stage, Thomas was 4 minutes and 54 seconds behind his Team Sky leader. Now he is 5:32 back, still in sixth place overall.
Froome’s closest rival remains Nairo Quintana, trailing by 3:10. Last year’s champion, Vincenzo Nibali, clawed back a few seconds by riding away from Froome’s group on the last climb. But the Italian is still 7:49 off the lead, in eighth place.