Pavel Sivakov (Ineos Grenadiers) crashed hard with 15km left to race of the stage to Cattolica, ending his overall hopes in the Giro d’Italia first with a massive time loss and later with news from his team that he would drop out of the race.
The young Russian rider seemed to touch wheels with a teammate and crashed hard, suffering cuts to his right leg and arm.
He got up, changed bikes and got going but lost any chance of catching the high-speed peloton that was preparing for the sprint finish. Jhonatan Narváez dropped back to help Sivakov and they rode slowly to Cattolica, finishing 13:08 down on stage winner Caleb Ewan (Lotto Soudal).
Ineos directeur sportif Matteo Tosatto said that Sivakov has a suspected fractured collarbone.
"It was a bad crash but the good news is that Pavel finished the stage," Tosatto said.
"He is in pain and he feels he’s broken his collarbone. He’ll go for an x-ray and we can only cross our fingers and hope it’s not fractured."
"He’s out of the overall classification but the important thing he’s not seriously injured. Pavel had shown he was on form at the Tour of the Alps. He’d shown he was good here too and so we hope he can recover and race on."
A few hours after the conclusion of the stage, Ineos Grenadiers announced Sivakov would abandon the race but had yet to confirm his injury, stating he had injured his shoulder.
Sivakov was named as joint team leader for Ineos Grenadiers but lost time on stage 3 to Sestola and was 30 seconds down on the other GC contenders.
Sivakov crashed hard at the 2020 Tour de France but managed to make it to Paris. He also crashed at the recent Tour of the Alps.
