Megan Armitage has suffered the cruelest luck of her cycling career to date, with a crash ruling the Offaly woman out of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, which she was due to start with her team this Sunday.
Armitage has been one of the star performers for Arkéa Pro Cycling this season and was told back in April she was assured of her place in the Tour de France line-up. That was confirmed last week when the team announced its selection for the week-long Tour and Armitage was included.
However, she has just suffered a training ride crash, in the final 72 hours of her preparation, and that fall has definitely ruled her out of the race. Her team said in a brief statement this morning she had suffered concussion and the protocol around the condition must now be followed, which rules her out of racing for a period.
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"Megan Armitage fell hard yesterday afternoon in training which resulted in a concussion," the team said in its statement. "In application of the UCI protocol, Megan will not be able to take part in Tour de France Femmes. She will be replaced by Clara Emond."
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It is a devastating set-back for Armitage, who was the first woman to make the start list of the women's Tour, though she will not now make the start line.
Armitage won the final stage plus the overall classification in the Vuelta Extremadura Féminas in March and netted fourth in the mountains classification in the Tour de Normandie Féminin later that month.
She has not just secured the first ever victory by an Irish woman in a UCI-ranked stage race this year but has also been really aggressive – often in very hard finals – in major races where she did not place in the final results, including De Brabantse Pijl (1.Pro) in Belgium in April.
She also placed 4th in Grand Prix Féminin de Chambéry (1.1) in April and since then has finished 13th overall in Internationale Lotto Thüringen Ladies Tour (2.Pro) in Germany and also completed Tour de Suisse Women (2.WWT) last month, which looked like ideal preparation towards Tour de France Femmes (2.WWT).
