Rough Tour de France start for Movistar as Soler abandons, López loses time

The Movistar Team at the start of the Tour de France 2021
The Movistar Team at the start of the Tour de France 2021 (Image credit: Getty Images Sport)

Like so many other squads in the opening day of the 2021 Tour de France, Spanish team Movistar endured a rough day at the office as co-leader Miguel Angel Lopez crashed and lost time while two of their other top names, Marc Soler and Alejandro Valverde, both were injured. The team later announced that Soler had fractures to both arms and has abandoned the race.

Affected by both of the two big late crashes and forced to chase hard between the two as well, López finally finished 1:49 down on stage winner Julian Alaphilippe (Deceuninck-QuickStep). Soler, dead last on the stage and 24 minutes down, then went to the hospital for scans and was diagnosed with fractures to the radius in both arms and his left ulna and will not start stage 2.

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Alasdair Fotheringham

Alasdair Fotheringham has been reporting on cycling since 1991. He has covered every Tour de France since 1992 bar one, as well as numerous other bike races of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the Olympic Games in 2008 to the now sadly defunct Subida a Urkiola hill climb in Spain. As well as working for Cyclingnews, he has also written for The IndependentThe GuardianProCycling, The Express and Reuters.