Lionel Sanders “beat up” after crash
The only thing I take from this is that my training is going in the right direction
Photo by:
Kevin Mackinnon
As he was seemingly putting himself in a position to go for the win at Clash Miami last Friday, Canadian Lionel Sanders crashed on the bike with just a few laps of riding to go, ending his race day. On the weekend Sanders updated his fans on his condition and had some insights as to what happened.
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One of the athletes who was behind Sanders when he crashed, The Netherlands’ Youri Keulen, was able to provide some insight as to what happened, Sanders said.
“I took the corner fine, went a bit wide out of the corner, and was going down in my TT bars,” Sanders was told by Keulen. “And, as I was going down in the TT bars, I went to pedal and I pedalled slightly too early and the shoe hit the ground and, at 46 km an hour with a bit of tilt on it and still turning, well, I rolled over sideways over the handlebars.”
Sanders has never been renowned as being particularly good when it comes to bike handling, but he looked very good through the technical course at Homestead-Miami Speedway. He credits some of that new-found ability to riding on rollers.
“That’s the best I’ve ever rode around corners and handling,” Sanders said in the YouTube video (see below). “It was some of the best bike handling I’ve ever done – I might have got too confident.”
“I felt really good and was ready to do a really good run,” Sanders said of his effort. “The bike was extremely controlled – it was 345 watts until I crashed, and it was dead steady the whole time.”
Sanders had only decided to compete in the race on the Monday before.
“No one to blame but myself,” he continued. “The one con that I didn’t account for … crashing. I did not put that into the cons list for coming to the race.”
Now he’s going to lose some training time as he waits to recover.
“I’m quite beat up,” he said. “My knee hurts quite a bit. I took a good tumble at moderately high speed. Now I don’t know – big time question mark as to how soon I’ll be able to get back to training normally. This was supposed to be ‘no change to the training’ – I did my entire block as planned and the next block started today … that plan has gone out the window. We will start training again when the body allows it. Sometimes when you make a last minute decision and it all seems like it’s panning out great, it doesn’t pan out as great as you hoped.”
After an impressive sixth-place finish at the Arena Games Montreal, Sanders remains positive about his training at this point of the year.
“The only thing I take from this is that my training is going in the right direction,” he said. “I didn’t get to showcase my run, but my run is in good form.”
