"Physically you're at your best, you've been away preparing for months, and then it all ends. The Tour is a big beast that eats you up and you can't compare it to anything else" — Tom Steels

Put yourself in the mind of a professional cyclist. It's been a lifelong ambition to ride the Tour de France, the biggest, grandest, most magnificent bike race of all. You've literally dreamt of riding up the famous cols. You've imagined fans at the side of the road screaming for you as your front tyre rolls over your name that is chalked onto the road. On your long, solo training rides in preparation for the race, you fantasise that you can smell the barbecues, and hear the never-ending roar of noise from the hundreds of thousands of spectators. For three glorious summer weeks, you're going to be a hero, a protagonist in one of the globe's premium sporting events, a spot reserved for only a select few. And who knows, perhaps you'll win a stage, a classification jersey or maybe the whole thing…

But then on day one of the race, disaster strikes. You crash, injure yourself and exit the race. You were riding the Tour de France, your name still appears in all of the previews and in the sticker books, but now you're not. You were on the inside but now you're on the outside, just like everyone else. Six months of training and perfectly-tuned preparation, in the words of Richard Carapaz, goes "down the drain". "Everything goes to shit," the Ecuadorian adds.

He'd know. In 2023, on stage one through the winding and undulating streets of the Spanish city of Bilbao, Carapaz crashed with 12km to go, along with Spanish hope Enric Mas. Both failed to start the next day. This is what happens when a rider sacrifices everything to make the Tour – only for the prize to be snatched away from them before they and the race have even got going.

The Leader

Carapaz remembers vividly how crucial the 2023 Tour was for him. He'd joined EF Education-EasyPost from Ineos Grenadiers the previous winter and the Tour was everything for him and his new employers. "It was the big objective for us all," Carapaz says. "For the team because it's really important for the sponsors, and for me because I wanted to win stages and the mountains jersey." Two years earlier he had finished third on GC.

In preparation for the Grand Boucle, Carapaz decamped to Font-Romeu and Andorra to spend two months training at altitude. The 2019 Giro d'Italia winner went into the Tour "feeling good, knowing I had good form to do well" but admits that so much time away from home before the big event "is really hard on a psychological level because you have to be training, concentrating and doing everything correctly for two months."

The reward for all those hours climbing up and down mountains and living an isolated, monkish life? Kissing the asphalt just a stone's throw from the finishing line in Bilbao, less than five hours after the Tour had begun. "We rode well as a team, I had teammates around me, but then suddenly I heard a boom, I fell and everything changed. Everything," Carapaz recalls. "I stood up and screamed, 'Ah, what pain'. I fell back down. My knee was super swollen. My DS arrived and approached me calmly. 'It's okay, forget the GC, we can go for stages', he said. I was thinking if I could just get through the first week I could do that, but I tried to get back up again and I couldn't stand up on my left foot. It was impossible to pedal with both legs."

Carapaz, somehow, made it to the finish, 15 minutes after the stage winner Adam Yates. Upon arriving at the team bus, though, he realised he wouldn't be continuing. "Buah, vaya mierda" – how shit. "I couldn't even get off the bike or climb onto the bus. I knew then it was a lot more serious than I first feared."

Along with Mas, Carapaz abandoned the race. He had suffered a small fracture in his left kneecap. The disappointment was tinged with bitterness. "Everything I'd done to be in this form and in one second everything went to shit. It was a slap in the face," he says. "It was my first year in the team, my first Tour with them, and at once everything went down the drain. With your teammates, it's like you've failed them because you know they're there for you, they live for you, and then on the first day you crash and fall. It's unsatisfactory and it hurts. When a domestique crashes out you can maybe compensate and replace them, but when you're the leader it's like: now what do we do? How do we survive? For the team it's a really big hit."

Illustration: Tom Jay

The Bodyguard

Two years earlier, at the 2021 Tour, the opening weekend was marred by the infamous Opi-Omi crash when a spectator holding a cardboard sign brought down half of the peloton. Four went home injured as a direct consequence of the mass pile-up. Ignatas Konovalovas survived the big fall, but a short while later, 8km from the finish in Landerneau, he wasn't to be so lucky. "My job was to protect [Groupama-FDJ teammate] David Gaudu and keep him out of trouble," the Lithuanian remembers. "Stefan Küng took over in the final and I was going back through the peloton. I was well positioned when someone at the front touched wheels with another on a fast downhill and I was caught behind." Konovalovas only remembers one thing about the crash. "Hitting the brakes full-on, almost closing my eyes because I could see what was going to happen – there were already riders on the grass." Konovalovas flipped and landed in a ditch. He then blacked out, temporarily.

"I remember waking up and shouting and feeling other guys crashing on top of me. One, two, three guys. And then losing consciousness again. When I came back around, the peloton was gone and there were just us six or eight injured riders left, laying around on the ground. I understood then it was all over."

Konovalovas had pain in his back and legs, and scans would later show he broke a few tailbones. But that wasn't the big problem. "When doctors came I realised that I didn't remember the crash. I must have hit my head. The last thing I remembered at the time was preparing for the Tour de France. I clearly had a concussion. I got in the ambulance and asked to borrow the doctor's phone to message my wife. I started doubting if we were even still together, it was a really strange feeling, and then I remembered we had two kids. But I wasn't even sure of that."

Upon arriving at Brest hospital, doctors found a ball of liquid next to Konovalovas's pancreas that they feared had leaked from the organ. It turned out it was actually a cyst he had been born with and posed no health problems, but doctors didn't know that at the time and were seriously worried for Konovalovas. As a result they placed him in intensive care for the first 48 hours and kept him in hospital for a further nine days. To fill his days, he listened to podcasts, read about investments, and made the place as homely as possible. "On the third day, I ordered a coffee machine off Amazon, and was then ordering Uber Eats as I got tired of hospital food. I basically lived there for 11 days. I can't say I enjoyed myself too much, but I found things to do."

Illustration: Tom Jay

All the while, the Tour continued without him. "I called my wife and I was really crying, tears flowing like a river without saying much. I felt like all the sacrifice and everything I had done was for nothing. I was really upset." After a few days, Konovalovas exited the team's Tour WhatsApp group, but continued to watch the race as "I accepted that that's it, it's the past, you can't change anything." When he was finally discharged from the hospital, staff gifted him a polka dot jersey signed by all of the doctors and nurses who attended to him. "That was a lovely gift from really nice people," he smiles. "I still have it at home."

The Tester

Also ending up in hospital on the evening of day one of the race was Luke Durbridge. The career-long Jayco AlUla rider had started the 2017 race hoping that he could potentially break into the top-five of the opening day time trial around a very wet Dusseldorf. He ended it with a fractured heel and a torn tendon in his foot. "I went over the top of a climb and got into the tuck position on a descent," the Australian says. "If I think about it now I should never have got into a tuck position. But I did, and I tried to take a left-hander but just aquaplaned in the same spot where [Alejandro] Valverde broke his foot [and kneecap]. I hit the ground and then went feet-first into the curb, cracking my shoe."

Durbridge rode to the finish, and with his foot having ballooned in size, he hobbled around the team hotel on crutches that night. "I was telling everyone I was starting tomorrow," he says. It was a fanciful proposition. "I had a tendon popping out of my heel but we taped it with duck tape." Remarkably, he did start stage two. But he didn't last long. "In the neutral zone we went up a hill and the tendon popped out again. I got on the radio, shouting, 'Boys, I gotta stop. My tendon is on the other side of my ankle!' There was no possible way I could finish this bike race. I flew home, devastated."

At the time, Durbridge was 26-years-old. He didn't know he'd ride another seven and counting. "Now I look at it and I was a stupid kid. With the same mentality I have now, I'd have stopped there and then, but at that age there's nothing else other than the Tour de France in your life. Nothing else matters. You're so single-minded that you think nothing could be any worse than not being able to do the 2017 Tour de France. You think you couldn't possibly be in a harder, more terrible situation. You're at home, depressed, upset, your world is ending."

Durbridge's world was caving in around him – or so he thought. "You get home to your parents, wife and kids and you have this element of wanting people to realise that you've not finished the Tour de France. Then all of a sudden you say that to yourself in the mirror and you think: 'Right, you egotistical wanker! Why does your life matter more than anyone else's?' It's not that the Tour doesn't matter, but you quickly snap out of that thinking by your wife telling you she loves you no matter what and getting back home into a normal environment. You realise the world continues and that the only one who's disappointed is you. No one else is ever as sad as you are. No one cares about your life as much as you do."

The Sprinter

That's not entirely true. A rider's abandonment does have an impact on others, not least team aspirations and strategy – as EF learned after Carapaz's crash in 2023. When home favourite Mark Cavendish crashed out of the 2014 Tour on day one in Harrogate, Omega Pharma-Quick-Step's plans were torn up. "We only had a plan A and we built the team around that and around Mark. We had no other plan," Quick-Step's long-time sports director Tom Steels says. "But then you let things settle. You start the race with your eight best riders so you're never really out of the race. In the end we won three stages with Tony Martin and Matteo Trentin so we stayed in the Tour."

The task of initially comforting a distraught Cavendish fell to Steels. "It's really difficult, but you can only say – and it's the truth – that time passes, one day you'll start racing again and it'll all be forgotten. The best thing a rider can do is to take a week off and concentrate on other things, but that's hard when the biggest sporting event is on TV and in every newspaper."

Steels' perspective comes from personal experience. At the 1997 Tour he left the race on his debut on stage seven after throwing a bidon at rival rider Frédéric Moncassin. "Nothing was going my way, there was a lot of stress and nervousness in the peloton, everything was hectic," Steels remembers. "It was a windy finish and I almost hit the barriers at the end. I stayed on my bike, but was boxed in and I lost it. I was disqualified and was sent home. Lucky for me I learned a lot and never again got myself in that situation."

The Endgame

Steels was also lucky in that he returned to the Tour another five times, going on to win nine stages. Carapaz, too, proved that it's possible to overcome such heartache, winning the mountains classification in 2024. "You learn how to get through the downs with your head held high," the Ecuadorian says. "You can't blame anyone or anything. You search for new goals."

But some never ride the Tour again. Konovalovas didn't. "It's just the way it had to be," he rues. "I just have to be happy that of the three Tours I did, I finished one in 2010."

Whether a rider returns to the biggest stage or not, there's no getting around the simple fact that crashing out of the Tour on the opening day is just about as low as one can get in professional cycling. "It's the worst race to be second in, the worst race you can abandon for your team's sponsors, and the worst race to crash out of," Steels summarises. "Physically you're at your best, you've been away preparing for months, and then it all ends. The Tour is a big beast that eats you up and you can't compare it to anything else. To crash out of another race is a pity; to crash out of this race, the biggest sporting event of the year, is a disaster."