Double Tour de France stage winner Ion Izagirre (Cofidis) has revealed that he is racing this year’s Grand Boucle with a broken rib, but insists that “It doesn’t hurt at all.”
The 35-year-old Basque suffered the injury in the Tour de Suisse, he told AS newspaper, when he became caught up in a crash with stage 1 winner and early leader Yves Lampaert (Soudal-QuickStep) and finally abandoned on stage 7.
A winner in Morzine in the Alps in the 2016 Tour de France and again in a brutal transition stage to Belleville-en-Beaujolais in 2023, Izagirre explained that although he and his team had doubted whether he could race this year’s race, finally it was decided he would do so.
“Two days after the fall, it didn’t even bother me any more,” Izagirre, 35, told AS, “but then I went to the physio.
“They saw that it was broken. I warned the team and the doubts began about whether I could race. We decided to take it calmly, just testing myself. As I still didn’t have any more pain in training, finally we agreed I could take part, knowing that I wouldn’t be at 100% in the early stages.”
Izagirre was in the first big break of the race, however, for around 120 kilometres, although he dropped back two-thirds of the way through. After five stages, he was lying 79th overall.
“It doesn’t hurt at all. I was in doubt because I couldn’t train well, but the first day I got in that break, my legs are going well and I’m hoping I can continue that way. If it had hurt, I wouldn’t have come. But an injury like this, you just have to wait.”
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Rib injuries are anything but predictable, though, Izagirre recounted that in 2014, in his first Tour de France, he’d suffered an identical injury “and it hurt a lot.”
“Obviously, you work things out and whether it’s worth waiting and preparing for the Vuelta, but this is the Tour, with all that that means. I expect I’ll get better as the race goes on.”
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