Giro d’Italia race doctor Giovanni Tredici has detailed what happened immediately after today’s crash involving Leopard-Trek rider Wouter Weylandt, saying that the rider received all the help possible but that nothing could be done.
“The resuscitation operation lasted 45 minutes, as the protocol required, but we waited for the helicopter and as they intervened, it turned out that the operations we carried out were not going to change the situation,” he said. “The situation was already desperate, I was the first to intervene as my car was right behind the peloton. We started the operation within 30 seconds, but the situation was very severe, without any possibility of resuscitating the rider, even when the mobile resuscitation centre came one minute 30 seconds afterwards.”
Tredici was speaking at a press conference held at 7.30 this evening in the press room close to the finish line of the stage. Race director Angelo Zomegnan was also present and spoke of his shock and sadness at the news. He said that it was a conference that he never wanted to have to give, and was clearly moved.
“’I feel obliged to share a text message I received,” he said during a statement he delivered. “This is a sport where everybody must applaud all the riders, in which all the riders risk their lives in every single metre of the course, and in which when something like this occurs, everybody is on the side of those who go through such a terrible grief.’
The details of how exactly the rider fell, and why he crashed so heavily, are yet to be determined. Zomegnan said that an investigation was ongoing. “Right now the magistrature are working on the dynamics of the crash, working with the people who were close to Wouter when the crash happened,” he said. “It will be a kind of judicial reconstruction which, of course, we don’t want to intervene in any way.”
Tredici said that a number of medical experts were on the scene very quickly. “Let me add a couple of details. I was the first to arrive, together with an expert in resuscitation, and very soon another expert from the Garmin team, Mr Shannon Sovndal, intervened. Within less than two minutes the reanimation mobile intervened with their experts. So we were certainly a very experienced team.”
He, like many others, was shaken by what had happened. The riders will be equally affected, particularly those who knew Weylandt, and it will be an extremely difficult time for them.
Zomegnan confirmed that the race would continue. He said that stage four would be run off in muted fashion, with a minute’s silence to be held before the start, and that things would once again be low key at the finish.
As for what happens in-between, he said that it was up to the competitors themselves to decide how to run it off. “Now we leave all the riders from the Leopard Team as well as all the riders participating the Giro d’Italia to freely choose how to interpret tomorrow’s stage. Any choice they will make will be respected by us,” he said.