Dutchman discusses his recovery from serious injury
Tuesday 17 February 2015 15:44, UK
Team Sky’s newest mountain goat still speaks with a sense of relief when he reflects on one of the worst crashes in recent Tour de France memory.
It happened two and a half years ago and he is now fully recovered, but Wout Poels has not forgotten that it almost ended his career.
“I was three weeks in hospital and two weeks in intensive care,” the Dutchman says. “I didn’t ride a bike for five months – I was not allowed.”
Poels was 24 years old and 20th in the general classification when he was one of around 100 riders brought down in a huge pile-up inside the final 30km of stage six of the 2012 Tour de France.
Such was the scale of the incident, bodies were strewn across the full width of the road and a dozen or so riders even found themselves flung down grass verges. Jerseys were shredded and wheels were bent double.
Most were able to remount their bikes and carry on, but Poels was one of the unlucky few whose race was over.
He was taken to hospital, where doctors found three broken ribs, bruised lungs and ruptures to his spleen and a kidney. They feared he might lose the kidney but salvaged it.
“I had really bad injuries,” Poels adds. “I had a problem with my kidney and my left kidney has a little piece off now.
“In the beginning, when I was in the Netherlands in hospital, they told me that maybe it was better to stop cycling. I was a little bit in panic because I thought, ‘That’s my whole life. Cycling is my life and I don’t want to stop’.”
Poels, riding for Vacansoleil-DCM at the time, ignored their advice and returned to racing just seven months later, but the road to recovery was not an easy one.
“It was quite difficult to come back,” he says. “My first training [after the crash] was really easy but all of my muscles were gone. I was not going so fast.
“I was a little bit lucky with a bad crash that I can still ride a bike at a high level. Two years ago I didn’t expect it was possible to get that level again.”
Poels returned to the Tour in 2013 and is now hoping to ride the 2015 edition with one of cycling’s leading stage racing teams, having moved to Team Sky from Omega Pharma – Quick-Step over the winter.
He is among three climbing specialists signed by Sir Dave Brailsford in a bid to bolster Chris Froome’s chances of winning a mountainous Tour in July and could play a pivotal role.
Last year, he helped Rigoberto Uran finish second at the Giro d’Italia and is confident he can prove just as valuable to Froome.
“My role is going to be in the high mountains to support Froome,” he says at Team Sky’s winter training camp in Mallorca. “I think I can do it, like last year in the Giro, I did it with Uran.
“My goal is to go to the Tour de France and support the team over there. It is a big challenge for me because we have a lot of good riders, but I think if I have good shape, I can be a part of that.”
But Poels also has bigger ambitions than merely playing second fiddle to Froome. Last year he climbed to a solo win on a mountain stage of the Vuelta al Pais Vasco in Spain - his first and only triumph at WorldTour level - and he is hopeful there will be opportunities to add more victories to his palmares in Team Sky colours.
“I hope I can be in some races the leader, but we have to look which programme I am going to ride,” he says. “If I ride more with Froome, he is, of course, the leader and you have to support him.
“But there are other races where maybe he isn’t [present] where maybe I can do my own thing.”
Should those chances come along, expect Team Sky's miracle man to grasp them with both hands.
