Remco Evenepoel's Dooring
Twenty-four year old professional cyclist Remco Evenepoel has a knack for getting injured on his bicycle. Crashes for these athletes is nothing uncommon as bicycle racing carries these risks. During the 2020 Tour of Lombardy, a crash sent him into a ravine resulting in a pelvic fracture and lung injuries. Earlier this year another crash with other racers during the Tour of the Basque Country resulted in a fracture in his collarbone and right shoulder blade.
None of this has stopped him however from his massive success including being the first to win a double Gold in the Olympics shortly after a stunning performance in the Tour de France earlier that summer. That’s on top of a long list of other successes in his short career.
He’s now tending to new injuries but this time they’re not racing related. That’s because he got doored on a training ride in Oetingen, Belgium, a small town.
The driver of a bPost (Belgian Postal Service) van opened her door into Evenepoel’s path. He and his bicycle collided with the door resulting in rib, shoulder blade, and hand fractures along with lung injuries. The top tube of his gold painted S-Works split into two. The door of the postal van was “completely twisted” too according to a witness in a statement to to Belgian news source Nieuwsblad.
The driver of the postal van remained at the scene and cooperated with authorities and was said to be “extremely affected by the incident.” Evenepoel even thanked her for her support in remaining at the scene and cooperating.
The crash occurred on this street according and the witnesses who noted the condition of the door were owners of the Keurslager Bart & Sarah (butcher shop) shown in in the left-side of the photo.
One can see in the aerial imagery from Google Earth, the width of the street is about 6.5 meters or just a bit over 21’ wide. In that imagery, there are three motor vehicles parked at the curb, the one furthest to the south looks to have its driver’s side door open.
The street is marked as a Fietssraat zone roughly translated to a “bicycle street” where bicycle drivers have priority over motor vehicle drivers. There is no bicycle lane, door zone or not, on the street.
The speed limit in these zones for both groups is 30 km/hr or about 18.6 mph - a cakewalk speed for one of the world’s most accomplished bicycle racers and a speed easily achieved by bicycle commuters, weekend warriors, non-racing members of the “underwear tribe,” and virtually any novice on an e-bike. It’s unknown how fast Evenepoel was traveling here but doorings even at slower speeds can cause a surprising amount of damage to the bicyclist, the bicycle, and to the door of the opened motor vehicle.
Bicycle road races tend to occur in closed courses - that is the streets and roads are temporarily closed to the public while the race is being conducted. But training rides in between races are often done solo or with small groups and often with a sag vehicle on open public roads meaning the bicyclists in training are riding with regular motor and non-motorized traffic. This between the high handling skills of these racing cyclists can create a skills gap. That is, they’re excellent at what they do in racing each other, even with crashes being a high risk, but many are wholly incompetent when it comes to traffic skills.
In other words, not all bicycle racing skills and traffic skills are the same.
This is painfully obvious when observing virtually any member of the “underwear tribe” as revealed by Seth Davidson whether in a club, solo on the road, or online. It’s also something former Olympian track cyclist Shaun Wallace noted. Wallace had the humility to learn the tricks and techniques of safe, principled, and legal cycling and has been phenomenally outspoken against “protected” bicycle lanes and other unsafe infrastructure being built for “safety. “
It’s also impossible to know where Evenepoel sits - whether he knows about the hazards of doorings and that they’re virtually impossible to swerve or avoid once a door opens in the path of a cyclist riding the door zone.