A chilling testimony. Hit by a car Thursday during a training outing near Lamballe (Côtes-d’Armor), French cyclist Thibault Guernalec suffered a huge accident. The rider from the Arkéa-B&B Hôtels team, whose life is not in danger despite numerous injuries, gave his first reaction to Le Télégramme this Friday evening.
Operated after fracturing a lumbar vertebra, the 28-year-old Breton also revealed he had a “broken finger, a bruise in the eye” and “a concussion”. Above all, the head-on collision with the vehicle causes him amnesia. “What scares me is that I don’t remember anything,” he told the regional daily.
“For almost four hours, it was a black hole”
“I don’t remember going out for a ride, I don’t remember sending messages to my loved ones before hitting the road. I don’t remember the accident, either. For almost four hours, it was a black hole. I have no memory. Nothing,” he revealed.
Guernalec, forced to withdraw from his very first Tour de France due to a broken hand last June, still seems stunned by the violence of the shock he has just experienced. “I still came close to being in a (wheelchair) chair,” said the French wheeler, aware of having come close to the worst and uncertain about the rest of his career.
“It makes you think about our sport, about its dangerousness, about the risks of this profession. There, I’m still in a bad state,” he said at the conclusion of the interview, without knowing the extent of the after-effects that the accident will probably leave. For the moment, the French runner remains hospitalized at Pontchaillou Hospital in Rennes. He told Le Télégramme that he tried to walk in the corridors of the CHU, before feeling “a little unwell.” »
