On his way home at the end of a training ride earlier today, Andy Jacques-Maynes was injured in a hit and run after a car swerved into the bike lane. Injuries sustained include a probable broken shoulder blade and collarbone as well as road rash on his right side.
“I was just on my way back to here, riding in the bike lane, just yesterday I was riding on the same road, I’ve probably ridden on that road to end almost every ride.” Jacques-Maynes told podiuminsight.
“All of a sudden there’s a car up under my elbow, clips my bar, this loud bang – I don’t even remember seeing it, I heard it and then it just tossed me to the ground. I just slid to a stop and so I have a bunch of road rash, whatever, but I landed straight on my shoulder and instantly popped up and I was like oh, oh. But even as I was sliding, looking up (and thinking) ‘what the hell was that?’ I could see the car, just driving away, they never hit their brakes, no nothing.”
“I hadn’t even stopped sliding and I was yelling ”What the f*ck’. I was pissed.”
Sitting at home and in obvious pain with his left arm in a sling, the 34-year old added, “I can’t really move or do anything. I can sit here and be kind of comfy and then I move a millimeter and I just lock up and it hurts so f*cking bad. It’s pretty awful.”
Jacques-Maynes was hit on Holohan avenue, in Watsonville, a straight road with a bike lane. He identified the car as a black Chevrolet Impala.
“I stuck around for awhile until the CHP showed up, did a report and all that. I caught the tiniest glimpse of the car, who knows if I even said the right make or identified it properly because it was so split second.”
“Then we just drove off to the hospital in San Jose, got a bunch of x-rays and I have an appointment tomorrow to find out more, but pretty sure that my shoulder blade is broken, it feels that my collarbone is broken but it’s kind of being held together by my plate that’s already in there. I can touch, and that doesn’t feel good. It’s not one hundred percent and the trauma doc at the ER was like ‘yeah it looks all good’ and I was like ‘okay for you, all good means that I’m not bleeding internally’. I’m alive and now I have to go see more docs to figure out exactly the extent of the damage.”
The same collarbone was broken in a horrendous crash at the Memorial Day criterium in 2007 when Jacques-Maynes crashed straight into a lamp poll. That day the extent of his injuries included a bruised lung, several fractures to the rib connectors to his thoracic spine, several m-plate fractures (connector to the vertebrae), both of his clavicles & scapula.
He had planned to race the final Surf City Cyclo-X race of the season later that afternoon with his brother Ben. “This was going to be my last race and then it was going to be skiing every weekend.”
“What a pain in the ass but it could have been a lot worst too. I could have easily died. It’s just crappy.”
It does suck but it could have been much worst. Earlier today, Spanish mountain biker Iñaki Lejaretta was killed during a training ride when he was struck by a car.