Lotto Soudal captain crashed hard in the finale of yesterday's stage. He explains how he feels after a hard night.

“On the road where I crashed, there were small stones and gravel. The riders in front of me dodged, and everyone reacted to that. I was going about fifty to sixty kilometres an hour when I rode into the guardrail. I was afraid that I would have broken something, but fortunately that wasn’t the case. Full on adrenaline I continued the race.

“I didn’t have a good night sleep last night. It’s not just the pain that bothers me, but also the uncomfortable feeling of the wounds. Yesterday I was mostly concerned about my knee. There’s a big fleshwound on my knee that couldn’t be stitched. They did stitch my elbow and now there are about twenty stitches in there. My knee still bothers me and it’s swollen, however I think that for today’s stage my elbow will be the biggest problem. It will be hard to pull on my steering wheel. Anyhow, I am starting today but we’ll see how it turns out. Soon enough I’ll find out if I will be able to reach the finish or not. I do hope that today’s stage won’t be like the one of yesterday with many attempts to set up a breakaway and a very fast peloton chasing them down.

“Quitting a Grand Tour is not something a rider likes to do. In those races you always push yourself a little bit more. I just hope that I’ll survive the next few days. Yesterday I was able to still limit the time differences, but I’m afraid that a good GC isn’t possible anymore. Even if I survive the next few days, most possibly I will still lose time. However, if I continue in this Vuelta, I hope that I can still reach some good results in the next two weeks.”