- HOT TOPICS:
- An American start for the Giro? •
- 2010 Routes: Giro | California | TdF •
- LA doc guilty on all counts
Injured reserves: Slipstream’s Zabriskie, Duggan play the waiting game
- Article Extras
- Photos
Six weeks ago, Slipstream-Chipotle’s Timmy Duggan was slated to be a member of team time trial winning squads at both the Tour de Georgia and the Giro d’Italia. Instead, Duggan went down in a pileup in Georgia the day before the TTT and suffered a brain injury that landed him in an Athens hospital for several days. Duggan hasn’t raced since and his season’s plans are now up in the air.
Duggan’s teammate Dave Zabriskie was an integral part of the team’s successful TTT squads in Georgia and Italy, and was slated to ride the Tour de France. But Zabriskie crashed hard the day after Slipstream’s stage-winning performance and fractured a vertebra. Like Duggan, his season plans, including the Tour, are now uncertain.
Both serious injuries highlight the rollercoaster ride the revamped Slipstream team has suffered in its first season among the top teams of the sport.
At the season-opening Tour of Qatar, Slipstream lost the opening team time trial by a scant two seconds and just missed a stage in with a well-oiled lead-out train in stage 4, but then lost Magnus Backstedt to a broken collarbone the next day in a crash that also took down Julian Dean and Chris Sutton.
The team had a strong showing at February’s Amgen Tour of California, but came away with second and third overall and no stage wins and saw Tom Danielson discover a herniated disc dating back to a crash at the 2007 Vuelta España.
In Georgia, Slipstream took the TTT stage but lost Duggan and a few days later watched Trent Lowe’s race lead climb away in the final 500 meters of Brasstown Bald.
At the Giro Slipstream won the first stage, putting Christian Vande Velde in the maglia rosa, but then lost Zabriskie and the race lead the following day, and watched David Millar’s chances for a stage 5 victory evaporate when he snapped his chain 500 meters from the finish line.
More recently, American Tyler Farrar was diagnosed with parotitis, an inflammation of the largest of the salivary glands, and was hospitalized for intravenous antibiotics, forcing him to miss the Tour of Picardie and the Volta Catalunya.
“It’s all about the highs and lows,” team manager Jonathan Vaughters said following Millar’s disastrous mechanical last week. “I guess that makes it more interesting.”
Zabriskie shared a common sentiment about his exit from the Giro, the second time in three years the American has ridden to time trial victory on the opening stage of a grand tour only to crash out of the race during the first week. (The first instance came in July 2005, when Zabriskie beat Lance Armstrong during the Tour’s opening time trial, only to crash out of the race several days later while wearing the yellow jersey.)
“That’s how I do it — I start with a bang, and end in pain,” Zabriskie said. “No big deal.”
And though Zabriskie’s unique brand of humor allows him to joke about the situation, his injuries, and particularly Duggan’s, were no laughing matter.
From intensive care to limbo
Duggan went down in a crash with Health Net-Maxxis rider Corey Collier and Toyota-United’s Ben Day during stage 3 of the Tour de Georgia when their tires sunk into a two-inch wide crack in the road. Collier was first to crash, at speeds over 45 mph, shattering his carbon fiber Cannondale. Duggan launched over the Health Net rider, landing hard on his helmet and shoulder, breaking his clavicle and scapula and suffering mild brain hemorrhaging. Duggan’s parents and wife Lauren traveled to Georgia that afternoon, fearing the worst. Fortunately the bleeding subsided and Duggan did not require brain surgery.
In Duggan’s honor, the entire Slipstream team placed blue handlebar tape on its seat post featuring the words “Just Go Harder” — the slogan and name of Duggan’s Web site shared with longtime friend Ian Macgregor, who rides for Team Type 1. (Duggan posted a journal entry on May 16th recounting his injury and recovery.)
The crash meant that not only did Duggan miss out on the following day’s team time trial in Georgia, but he also missed his a start at the Giro, his first shot at a grand tour.
“Those two races where what I had been looking forward to over the last six months,” Duggan said. “To have this happen the day before [the TTT win] came together was hard. But to see my team go out and win anyways, that felt really good. We were watching the race at the hospital, on the computer, and I was still pretty out of it. I think I asked Lauren 25 times if we’d won or not, and she said every time she told me we’d won I reacted like it was the first time I had heard it. So I re-lived that victory 25 times.”
Duggan, 25, is expected to make a full recovery with no neurological damage. Although he’s passed tests ranging from cognition (number sequences and language patterns) to balance and coordination, a visit to a Denver neurologist last Friday revealed that his brain still shows traces amounts of bruising.
“There’s still a clot on the brain, still some blood there,” Duggan said. “That’s the catch. If my body can’t deal with reabsorbing all that blood now, then if I were to crash again and hit my head, and have blood in a different spot in my brain, my body wouldn’t be able to deal with it. It’s just too risky. I can’t risk falling on my head, at least for the next two or three months.”
Duggan returns for another MRI in three weeks. Should the clot have diminished, he might be able to return sooner.
“My number one priority is getting healthy,” he said. “I’m not going to race or train and risk falling on my head and dying.”
For now, Duggan is in limbo. Not only can he not race or even ride outside, he’s been told to closely monitor his blood pressure, which means keeping his heart rate below 120 beats per minute. Exercise plans in the near future include walking and slow hiking.
“I can exercise, but super easy,” Duggan said. “Any exercise, or even drinking alcohol, could cause more bleeding, because it raises your blood pressure, which could cause the clot to bleed out more. It’s hard because I have all this anger built up and I can’t train it out of my body.”
Duggan said he hasn’t yet fully absorbed the severity of his accident. He doesn’t remember any part of the crash, or the days of heavy sedation that followed.
“By the time I was coming around, I was in no pain and was perfectly coherent,” Duggan said. “But those two days when things were pretty serious, and my friends and family were freaking out, that whole part hasn’t hit me yet. It’s such a weird feeling that it has had such a huge impact on my season and my life and I don’t even know what happened.”
Duggan does know how lucky he is not to have suffered brain damage, or worse. Pointing to the recent paralysis of Tecos-Trek rider Fausto Esparza Munoz at the Tour of the Gila, Duggan said, “What I am going through is nothing compared to what he and his family are going through.”
Looking for a further silver lining, Duggan said the two- to three-month break would be the longest of his career.
“Every other time I’ve been injured I’ve actually come back stronger,” Duggan said. “What a great time to sit down and think about a weakness I might have. I have four months while everyone is out racing and pummeling themselves I can sit back and stay at home and really focus and improve one or two things. I think I will figure out something I can focus on, and I’ll come back stronger for sure. I have no expectations on any kind of timeline. I feel healthy right now, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to surprise some people with my recovery.”
Broken, but lucky
Zabriskie crashed into downed riders after a crash that occurred when riders ahead of him were urinating from the bike. Zabriskie had no time to react, and flipped over his handlebar, landing squarely on his back and buttocks. The impact fractured his L-1 lumbar vertebra, and Zabriskie was taken off course on a stretcher. In less than 24 hours Zabriskie had gone from atop the podium, spraying champagne on his teammates, to out of the race and uncertain for the Tour de France.
Over a career that has seen Zabriskie struck by an SUV while descending a Salt Lake City Canyon in 2003 and airlifted from a pileup at the Redlands Classic in 2004, the Utah native said the fractured vertebra ranked among the most painful of injuries.
“It hurt the most out of all my crashes so far,” Zabriskie said. “At least the initial pain was worse. I couldn’t breathe, and then the pain set in.”
Zabriskie said he is currently wearing a back brace, for comfort rather than necessity, adding that the fractured vertebra is “fairly stable.”
While he hasn’t ruled out competing at the Tour in July — the Tour’s start will be eight weeks from the date of the injury — Zabriskie said that at this point it’s just too early to say. Zabriskie was scheduled to meet with a spinal specialist on Tuesday in Los Angeles and expected to have a better idea then.
“He’ll run the numbers and see what I can do,” Zabriskie said. “If I let it heal correctly, it’s possible I could get four weeks of good training in and ride the Tour. I might not be super ready, but I might be able to race, and ride into form. But you have to let these things heal.”
The hardest part, Zabriskie said, is not knowing what the injury could do to his Olympic hopes, where he would be among the favorites to medal in the individual time trial. Selection to the U.S. team favors top international results, and the crash removed his chances of a top performance in Tuesday’s stage 10 time trial in the Giro, as well as the final time trial in Milan and possibly the Tour’s two individual time trials.
“I was really gunning for the time trial on May 20th,” Zabriskie said.
Zabriskie stayed in Italy for several days after the crash until he was healthy enough to fly. He wrote an extensive account of the days after his injury on his blog.
In it he writes about being stuck at a hotel in Paris on his return to the States after a delay caused him to miss his connecting flight.
“A woman getting a plug adapter next to me is wearing a shirt that says Bejiing 2008 and my eyes water up, not knowing if I will make it now due to the current circumstances,” he wrote. “I finally get to the room and really lose it for a bit.”
In addition to launching his DZ Nuts chamois cream and starting up his Yield to Life non-profit rider advocacy group, Zabriskie’s wife Randi is expecting their first child, a boy, on May 22 — meaning Zabriskie isn’t the only one walking funny.
“We’re both waddling around the house,” Zabriskie said. “It’s hard to bend over. I can walk, but not super far. But I don’t have to be in a wheelchair, which is nice. It could have been a lot worse. I can still feel my legs. I’m lucky.”
