Svein Tuft hasn’t had the luckiest of years, after a bad crash ruled him out of the Giro. He was heading for another bad injury at the Tour de France before his Orica-Greenedge plastic bottles saved him.

“I was bringing up bottles, but those bottles saved me,” Tuft recounted to VeloNews. “I had six bottles on the front of my jersey, and the road came in, and before I knew it, I was straight up on the curb, and then I hit the guardrail. That’s when I smacked my chest. There is a pole that supports the rail, and it stuck up higher, and that’s what I hit my chest on. I was quite lucky there.”

A veteran of eight Grand Tours, the 38 year old Canadian says this is the craziest opening week of all the Grand Tours he has ridden.

“It’s been the craziest opening week of any grand tour I’ve ever done,” said Tuft, who’s started eight grand tours. “Crashes just seem to happen everywhere.”

“Every day, it’s so stressful out there. It seems like we cannot ride on a straight road anymore,” Tuft said. “Sometimes you question why the GC teams are riding so much on the front, especially when it’s a classics-type stage, but then you ‘get it’ when you see all the stuff happening in the bunch. They’re expending energy, but they’re not breaking bones.”