Australian Michael Matthews says the only way to tackle a Tour de France sprint finish is to “turn your brain off” and not worry about crashes.
Two of the three flat stages in the first six Tour stages featured crashes that saw the likes of reigning champion Chris Froome taken down and losing some skin to the unforgiving tarmac.
On Tuesday, there were two crashes in the final kilometre, with Briton Mark Cavendish knocked out of the Tour with a broken shoulder blade after being elbowed into the metal barriers by Peter Sagan, who was disqualified.
There have been a few near misses too, notably featuring French rivals Arnaud Demare and Nacer Bouhanni.
But Matthews says you have to simply flip up the blinkers, turn off your thoughts and just pedal as hard as possible.
“Stop thinking!” he said when asked what a sprinter needs to do.
“You’ve got to turn your brain off and go for it, especially with what happened the other day with two crashes in the final.
“You can’t think that’s going to happen again, you’ve just got to switch off.”
Some have suggested that sprinters are getting wilder and taking more risks, but Matthews disagrees and insists it’s all just part of the job.
“It’s really hard to see on the TV how much risk people are taking,” said Matthews, who’s known as ‘Bling’ for his flashy taste and lifestyle.
“In the end it’s sprinting, it’s always going to be like this, it’s always been like this.
“If you want to be there you’ve got to take risk and I’ve got to do the same if I want to be up with these guys.”
The crash involving Cavendish and Sagan wasn’t the only high profile pile up in recent memory.
Cavendish crashed out of the 2014 Tour on the first stage in his native England in the sprint finish.
He broke his collarbone that time and brought down Australian Simon Gerrans, who also fractured his collarbone and had to quit the Tour.
Perhaps the most famous crash of all at the Tour was the sprint finish on the final stage at Paris’s Champs Elysees in 1991, when Uzbek Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, who was wearing the green sprinters’ points jersey he was sure to win if he crossed the finish line, clipped the barriers as he burrowed forwards, head down, and went flying spectacularly over his own handlebars.
He did manage to get up and finish unaided to claim his first of three green jerseys in four years, but that spectacular crash lives long in the memory.
Sagan won the green jersey in each of the last five years but now he’s out of the Tour, Matthews is one of a number of riders in the running to have a tilt at winning it this year.
He also has the advantage of being more of an all-round rider than the pure sprinters like Germans Marcel Kittel and Andre Greipel.
But the green jersey isn’t his priority.
“Last year I only started thinking about it in the last week,” said Matthews, who’s been one of the most active sprinters in the intermediate sprints on each stage.
“This year it’s not taking any energy out of me to do the intermediates and you never know what happens down the road.
“Still, the main focus is the stage wins, but we’ve still got to see what happens in the third week, everything can change.”
He’s come close twice already, finishing second on Monday and third on Friday.
Matthews is currently third in the green jersey competition on 123 points, 74 points behind leader Kittel.
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