Splinter-related track cycling injuries like Lisandra Guerra’s a matter of the crash, not the track: officials
Warning: clicking "play" on the above video may -- in fact, will -- introduce you to a world of pain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMJlsDAHiKM
Warning: clicking “play” on the above video may — in fact, will — introduce you to a world of pain.
During Saturday night’s women’s track cycling sprint at the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Games, Cuba’s Lisandra Guerra suffered a hard, fast spill at the Milton velodrome, leaving the track with a gruesome eight-centimetre splinter lodged in her upper right arm. It was the first heat of her sprint quarter final against Luz Gaxiola, from Mexico, and resulted in Guerra’s withdrawal from Pan Am contention.
According to reports, the Cuban rider needed four stitches to mend the cringe-inducing injury. While the first response to a wipeout resulting in such injury may be that there’s something wrong with the track, though, authorities say that it has more to do with the physics of the crash than the surface cyclists ride upon.
Speaking to the CBC, Rob Good, a coach with Ontario’s track cycling development program, said that such rare situations are usually what happens when a speeding bike digs against the track’s wood as a crash is in progress. During track cycling events, riders move, on average, at speeds approximating 60 km/h. In a worst-case crash scenario, the result is the bike scraping along the track after a cyclist goes down, with the very real risk of wood splinters — like that which embedded itself in Guerra’s arm — flying like bullets.
In 2011, the same thing happened to Aziz Awang. That year, the Malaysian rider finished the men’s keirin final of the 2011 Manchester track cycling world cup with the bronze medal, as well as a 25-centimetre splinter through his left leg. Edward Dawkins, taken down by the same crash, thought Awang’s injury was of the more predictable variety: just a small chunk of wood embedded in his flesh. Then he looked closer.
“All I saw was the bit sticking out of the top,” he told the UK’s Metro after the 2011 crash, “and I thought they might as well just pull it out. Then I realized it went all the way through. You don’t see that very often.”
Take a look at that incident here:
