FILE -Remco Evenepoel, of Belgium, celebrates winning the men's road cycling event, at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Saturday, Aug. 3, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin, File)
December 03, 2024 - 5:21 AM
ANDERLECHT, Belgium (AP) — Double Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel was taken to hospital following a crash during training in Belgium on Tuesday.
Belgian media reported Evenepoel was unable to avoid the door of a post office vehicle when it was swung open. The 24-year-old never lost consciousness but the impact was heavy enough to break the frame of his bicycle.
Photographs online showed Evenepoel sitting beside an ambulance, wrapped in a blanket and holding his arm.
“We are still on our way, but we don’t know much more ourselves,” his father Patrick Evenepoel told Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad. “He was taken to the Erasmus hospital in Anderlecht.
“He has already sent us a message, so we hope that everything is okay. From what I hear, he fell after colliding with the swinging door of a Bpost truck.”
The incident happened in Oetingen, approximately 30 kilometers east of Anderlecht.
Evenepoel became the first cyclist to sweep the road race and time trial at an Olympic Games when he triumphed in both in Paris in August.
A two-time world champion, Evenepoel also won the Spanish Vuelta in 2022 and finished third in the Tour de France this year.
“He was lying on the ground for a while,” said Bart De Pelseneer, who has a butcher’s shop nearby. “It was clearly a heavy blow. The door of the postal car was also completely twisted. His bike was completely broken, they folded it up like a wheelchair.
“When I went to look he looked deathly pale, the emergency services gave him a Coke. His wife Oumi was here at about the same time as the emergency services.”
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