'I looked down and saw red': Dowsett battles on despite neck injuries in Poland

The fresh wounds on Alex Dowsett's neck – a series of neatly spaced horizontal and vertical lines – make the Movistar man look like he's been attacked by a vampire-inspired designer, rather than slashed by a chainring in a pile-up at the end of stage 1 of Tour de Pologne. As he put it on his Twitter account next to a photo of his neck: "Campag, Shimano or Sram spacing anyone?"

Dowsett was one of several riders that went down in a stage one pile-up around 300 metres from the finish in a fraught bunch sprint, with the series of cuts causing concern because he is a haemophiliac and they came close to several major arteries.

Two days on, he's battling through, the neck injuries left plaster-free to get as much air as possible. He also had cuts and scrapes on the left side of his body and is generally a bit banged-up.

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"I was chipping around in the front, like I do a lot of the time, even if we haven't got a sprinter here," Dowsett told Cyclingnews on Monday, "just to see if we could wait and maybe have a bit of an opportunity. It'll happen once in a million times, but unless you're at the front and there, you don't know.

"So I was just waiting around and then, probably just at the point when I knew it wasn't going to happen, something [the crash] happened on the left, I turned right really hard and just got clipped. I don't remember how I ended up on the floor but it was pretty nasty.

"I looked down and saw red, so I knew I was bleeding pretty hard out of somewhere. I panicked because I couldn't see where the blood was coming out of. A paramedic came over and asked me if I was OK and I was like 'I don't know, you tell me.'

— Alex Dowsett (@alexdowsett) July 29, 2017

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