Woods mending from injury in Tour of Alberta
Ottawa rider broke clavicle in Stage 3 crash
The Tour of Alberta ended with a bang for Mike Woods, and so did his 2013 competitive cycling season.
The 26-year-old Ottawa resident had to drop out of the inaugural edition of the six-day, 800-kilometre tour after breaking a clavicle in a crash during the third of five stages.
“It sucked, especially because I broke it with 11 kilometres remaining on the stage,” Woods wrote in an email on Monday. “Definitely a tough pill to swallow as it means I will have to miss the World Tour races in Quebec and Montreal,” on Sept. 13 and 15.
Several years ago, Woods was a highly ranked middlerunner who set Canadian junior records in the mile and 3,000 metres in the summer of 2005. However, aspirations of competing in the Olympics and other world-level championships were dashed by persistent injury problems, including three fractures of the navicular bone on the top of his left foot.
A couple of years ago, though, he took up competitive cycling, leading to a position this year with the Quebec-based Garneau-Quebecor team, with which he was riding in the Tour of Alberta.
He was 87th after the opening prologue, but 35th after Stage 1 and 24th after Stage 2. Late in Stage 3 on Friday, he was knocked to the ground while travelling at a speed of about 40 km/h when another cyclist’s bike hit the rear wheel of Woods’ while he was trying to veer left to avoid a big pileup immediately ahead.
In a blog posting on Saturday, Woods wrote: “Watching Antoine Duchesne ride so well today in the Team Canada colours was a harsh reminder of the jersey that I will not be wearing next weekend, but I will live. I will get a plate screwed into my broken clavicle, I’ll get healed up, and I will do what I love best these days … riding my bike.”
It might have been small consolation for Woods, but there was better news for another Garneau-Quebecor teammate from the National Capital Region.
Kanata’s Alex Cataford finished 20th in the Tour of Alberta — eight minutes, 23 seconds behind Australian cyclist Rohan Dennis’s winning total of 17 hours, 48 minutes, 10 seconds.
Gatineau residents JeanSébastien Perron and Derrick St. John, members of the Ottawa-based Stevens Racing team — who, in this event, competed for the Canadian national squad — placed 66th and 85th, respectively. They were approximately 19 and 20 minutes off the pace set by Dennis.