Sam Hill Maribor crash on video
Caught by random Slovenian (now updated with photo too)
7:04pm, May 27th 2010
Surprised that this has taken so long to surface, but good to have it at last. For the sceptics this is clearly from his race run, he certainly looks keen enough that it can't be practice, and he seeded top so it wasn't that.
By my count (especially if you take exit speed into account) he's lost about 10 seconds in this crash. That'd give him the fastest middle split of the day by a couple of seconds, and hand him the win by some 5 seconds clear of Minnaar.
Of course that's all part of racing. Hill pushed too hard, and got it wrong, just like at Andorra and Val di Sole. Minnaar played it relatively safe, and got down the hill without any 10-second crashes. For all we know if he had hung it all out and risked a crash he could have challenged Hill's theoretical time. C'est la vie!
Now, a lot of people will be wondering whether Hill should be disqualified, under the rules, for not entering where he exited the tape.
From the UCI rule book:
4.1.035
If a rider exits the course for any reason, he/she must return to the course at the same point from which he/she exited.
(text modified on 25.09.07).
Personally I think it would be sacrilege if he was disqualified for this minor infringement, and I very much doubt he will be. I'm sure the UCI use their discretion in such matters and will observe that he clearly lost time overall, and not feel that he should have been forced to lose more time by re-entering before the tree.
I'd hate to see any rider stripped of their position because of an incident like this, and I think pretty much all racers would agree with that.
Video source: http://www.pinkbike.com/video/140561/
Photo source: Slovenian MTB forum
