‘My rib cage imploded’: Tour de France star Chris Froome’s horror bike crash
Monday, 13 July 2026
Chris Froome said he was “very lucky” to be alive after his rib cage “imploded” in a high-speed training crash last summer.
The four-time Tour de France winner, who confirmed last week that he had retired, had to be airlifted to a military hospital in Toulon after hitting a road sign at 50kph. The incident pierced his pericardium, the fluid-filled sac which surrounds the heart. He underwent emergency surgery to save his life, with doctors later telling him that most patients with his injuries do not survive.
Of the crash which almost killed him, Froome said: “I hit a road sign at 50 kilometres an hour [31mph]. Basically, it flipped me off the bike. Coming through my back, the sign broke all my ribs. The rib cage then basically imploded, destroying the right lung and one of the ribs pierced the pericardium, which is the fluid-filled double-walled sac that protects and anchors the heart.
“So the heart was exposed and my chest cavity was filling with blood. I couldn’t breathe. Thankfully, a car stopped and an ambulance got there within seven, eight minutes. That was really lucky. They shoved a tube between my ribs and that relieved the pressure. I was able to breathe a little more easily. As you can imagine there was blood everywhere and I was just watching this unfolding, feeling like I was a patient in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.”
Asked whether he thought he might die, Froome told The Times: “I knew it was extremely serious. My first thought was about cycling, which I know is crazy. I was thinking I will never ride another race. I could feel a lot of broken bones. There was also my back, I couldn’t move because I’d fractured a vertebrae.
“I was very lucky. Probably 25, 30 minutes later, a helicopter landed on the road next to me. They’d closed the road and they airlifted me to a military hospital in Toulon, where they were able to operate. The surgeon sewed up the pericardium and basically kept the heart in position. When I came round, he told me that it’s not often a heart continues beating with all that was happening to me. I am very lucky to be here today.”
The episode caused Froome, 41, to question what was important to him. “This crash was on a different level,” the British rider, who also had a life-threatening crash on a reconnaissance ride before the 2019 Critérium du Dauphiné, when he fractured his femur, hip and lumbar vertebrae, admitted. “With two young kids, I’m thinking what am I doing?
“I’ve had such an amazing career. What am I still chasing? It is clearly time for me to slow things down. Take more time with the family.
“After my 2019 crash on the recon ride at the Dauphiné. I believed I could come back and I was chasing that. It never did come back, but I needed to try. If I hadn’t I would have spent a long time wondering. I also had a five-year contract with Israel-Premier Tech that I wanted to see out.”
Froome spent four months in and out of hospital last year, requiring follow-up surgery after his lung collapsed a second time. He was on antibiotics for months, with doctors concerned about reinfection.
At the end of last year, Froome’s contract with the Israel-Premier Tech team expired and, although he never confirmed his retirement at the time, it came out naturally at the grand départ in Barcelona last week.
“Before the Tour, someone asked me if I’d stopped and I said, ‘Of course I’ve stopped’ and that is how the word of my retirement got out,” Froome said.