Crashing in the final 25km of the first stage of the Tour de France Femmes might usually be a reason to panic for a rider hoping to target the GC, but there was no drama and indeed no time loss for Marlen Reusser when that happened to her on the road to Lausanne.
On a tense day that saw several crashes, Reusser was the most high-profile name to be involved in an incident when her Movistar teammate Arlenis Sierra came down in a corner, with the Swiss rider tumbling over her.
The pair were quickly back up, checking over each other and their bikes, and then just had the task of chasing back onto the speeding peloton, which they did quickly and efficiently with added help from Sara Martín.
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Whilst sometimes the best-laid plans can go out the window in a moment of panic, Movistar stayed remarkably calm and collected, which their sports director said is no accident.
"Since we've been building these last few weeks, months, in a few races, mainly Giro and Suisse, there's been really good communication and working together, and I don't think in the moment we need a lot of words to do what we do," Movistar directeur sportif Kelvin Dekker told Cyclingnews at the finish.
"We stay really calm, also when Marlen crashed I never heard any panic over the radio, it was just really just the basic info on who's going to wait and who's not waiting and where they're waiting and all these things.
"I think we never really panicked; also kudos to Marlen for this. She stayed really calm. She has a lot of confidence in her teammates."
Reusser and Sierra also seemed to avoid any notable injuries in the crash.
"Arlenis is a tough cookie and she's quite hard to crack, so she seemed OK. She did a great job in the end, and also Marlen had a little tumble over her, but she was quite OK when I saw her at the end," Dekker said.
Reusser spoke pre-race about her potential love-hate relationship with cycling, where her multiple successes have come alongside several drawbacks, too, including stage 1 of this race last year where she had to pull out with food poisoning.
A year on, though, Movistar had a lot more to be happy about after the first stage.
"I think if you take away this part, we were always in the front, we were always where we wanted to be, so in the end it was a good day," Dekker said.
Indeed, Reusser came back to finish 10th on the punchy uphill finish on home roads during Switzerland's National Day, matching all of her GC rivals for a result that seemed unimpaired by the crash.
"It's pretty good, I think I would have signed for it before [the start]. We were of course dreaming a bit of winning or having something, but it was quite an effort to come back," said Dekker.
"Also, the positioning, we didn't have exactly the teammates we dreamed of left there because we were missing Liane, so that was quite an effort for her to be there in front but we managed to get her there and safe."
"I think this was really good; she didn't lose any time. She's not as explosive as some of her competitors, for sure not like Lorena Wiebes or Le Court-Pienaar or Rüegg, also not Longo Borghini or Demi, they're a bit better at this, so to lose no time if you see that others like Van de Breggen and Blasi lost time, then I think she's done really well."
Reusser was far from the only rider who crashed, with multiple riders hitting the deck on stage 1, which is notorious for being an incredibly tense and crash-prone day of racing.
Dekker said that the day was "not the worst, better than I expected. Some crashes, but not as huge as we fear sometimes," but explained why the Tour in particular often sees more incidents.
"There's 150 people in the bunch, and they're all in top, top, top shape and they're all the best riders selected by their teams, so the level is so high, so there are a lot more people who can be in the front and can do something.
"They have all leaders, they all have big goals, so the stakes are just really high. And that's just a guarantee for crashing at some point."
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