Despite the serious accident last Saturday, Warren Barguil is convinced that he will be one hundred percent for the Ardennes triptych in late April. The French leader of Giant-Alpecin underwent surgery yesterday after he broke his scaphoid when a car rode into the Frenchman and five of his teammates.

For the first time, Barguil has told his story about the circumstances of the accident. During a press conference in his hometown Hennebont, Barguil described the dramatic incident. 

“We were riding back to our hotel. I was taking a turn on the front, and at that moment, a car 300 metres up the road was taking a corner. I thought it was going too fast since it was in the left hand lane,” Barguil said, according to Ouest France. “It wasn’t that it was going too fast, but it was driving regularly and stayed in the left-hand lane.

“The car didn’t stop, it kept going straight on. She [the driver] braked at the point of the first impact. I was riding at 47kph, she was going at 50kph… There was no verge at the roadside, just rocks. I swung as far to the right as I could before the collision.”

The riders did everything possible to avoid the car but there was not enough room. 

“It was quite shocking. We were on the ground for a long time,” he said. “Only one of us managed to avoid the car, and it was he who called the emergency services. He took an arm warmer and used that to make a sling for one of the riders. It wasn’t easy, it was really chaos.

“For the first two or three days, we joked more after the accident, we downplayed it because we had been through that drama. I told myself I had to be positive. But since yesterday [Tuesday], I’m starting to realise we could all have died. And when I think that, it sends a shiver down my spine."

Le Telegramme reports that Barguil doesn't expect the incident to have any impact on his goals in the Ardennes and at the Tour de France and the Olympics.