After accidentally taking down Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) at the Tour de France in an incident that forced the green jersey to abandon, Bryan Coquard (Cofidis) received a yellow card and a 500 CHF fine from the race jury for an ‘irregular sprint’.
In a dramatic moment at the intermediate sprint, Coquard collided with Laurenz Rex (Intermarché-Wanty) as he tried to launch, only just keeping himself up and causing Philipsen, who was behind him, to crash.
The punishment was confirmed in the Tour’s official press release for stage 3, at 20:10, well after Coquard had offered an apology and spoken with sadness after seeing Philipsen leave the race. If he receives a second yellow card at the Tour, he will be disqualified.
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“A bad day, you can imagine that… Having the green jersey abandoned, it’s not a pleasant experience. I looked at the images a bit, I really don’t know what happened in fact,” said Coquard as he spoke to reporters at the team bus.
“I feel like [Jonathan] Milan is launching his sprint, maybe my front wheel is touching his derailleur or maybe it’s Rex who is throwing me off balance, I really don’t know.
“Obviously, it wasn’t my intention to cause a crash; I didn’t want to take any risks. I was clearly thrown off balance, I almost lost my shoe. Even if it wasn’t intentional, I want to apologize to Philipsen and Alpecin-Deceuninck. Even if I’m not a bad guy, it’s not pleasant.”
Philipsen suffered a displaced, fractured collarbone from the crash, which will require surgery, but his team were not trying to put the blame on anyone as they spoke to the media at the busy Alpecin team bus.
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“Jasper is the victim of something he’s totally not involved in, that’s clear. To be honest, the two others who collided, I think it’s not about blaming,” said team co-manager Phillip Roodhoft.
“It’s just a stupid crash. Things can happen, and the consequences for us as a team, but mainly for Jasper, are very bad, but what can you say? Bad things happen sometimes.”
The other team involved, Intermarché-Wanty, saw it similarly, confident that their man Rex had done nothing wrong, but that Coquard too was not to blame for what happened.
“No, I think it’s a race incident. You have one of the smallest sprinters going toward Rex, who is one of the biggest lead-out guys. I think the move was for Coquard to Rex, then he went the other way and took Philipsen down,” said Intermarché-Wanty performance manager Aike Visbeek at the team bus.
“I hope Jasper is OK it was a horrible sight.”
Visbeek also put down any idea that Coquard should not have been sprinting where he was and trying to move past Rex, aware that the Frenchman was well within his rights to go for the one point, but he did point out how the point of the race itself could have been safer.
“No, it’s an intermediate sprint; anyone who wants to sprint can sprint. The last years, they did a few of these sprints uphill, so the speeds were a bit lower,” said Visbeek.
“This was a high-speed sprint, and it was chaos. Laurenz actually punctured 10km before that, so he wasn’t actually with the train; he came from behind, and it was chaotic all over.”
While Coquard has now received his yellow card for the incident, Visbeek, like Roodhooft, saw no reason to go further than putting it down to a bad luck racing incident, as he described it two hours before the punishment was confirmed.
“That would be really strange,” to expect any relegation, “because Rex goes in a straight line, Coquard comes to him, I think there is nothing to blame.”
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