Team Physician Prentice Steffen, MDTeam Physician, Prentice Steffen, MD writes from Paris-Nice with Team’s Slipstream/Chipotle’s first “Injured Reserves” report:

I can only speak with authority about Slipstreams/Chipotle medical situations, but I can say with certainty that we’ve not had medical luck on our side recently. I arrived in France last week wondering if our good fortune would continue to hold out. Quatar, California, Het Volk/KBK were all good medically speaking, or at least the bad was manageable. But here, at the moment, illness and injury are prevailing.

It started with Tyler Farrar’s prologue effort in which he slid out with 2 km to go in what may well have been a yellow jersey earning time. Since then, he’s been unlucky enough to be involved in a couple of more minor crashes, and today abandoned halfway into stage 6.

Team Chiropractor Kevin Reichlin and I were theorizing this morning at breakfast about what sort of physical/physiologic adaptations seem to occur that allow more seasoned riders to bounce back more quickly from relatively minor crashes than do our younger guys. Whatever the explanation, it does seem to be true. So our young guys have struggled a bit.

There is young Tom Peterson who got tangled up in Tuesday’s stage 2 50+ rider pile up. In trauma situations, medical types like me always want to know what we call the precise “mechanism of injury”. Tom, in his usual, quirky way, described his crash as surfing face down atop someone else’s bike.

He said he had his arms up and out when another rider came down on top of his shoulder—the perfect “mechanism of injury” for a shoulder dislocation. Though Tom didn’t dislocate his shoulder, he may have popped it out partially and then it clunked back into place. In any case, a certain amount of stretching and tearing occurred on structures not intended for stretching and tearing.

So Tom, normally an invaluable contributor to the team effort, hasn’t been able to give much. In fact, during the past couple of days, he’ quickly found his place in the grupetto and is riding for experience sake.

And then there was Friday’s crowning bit of bad luck. David Millar, who has been struggling with a cold virus the past few days, didn’t start stage 5. He went home to get in some serious recovery time.

So there you have our first “injured reserves” report. Some bad luck, but the morale continues to be good.

PDS