Another casualty of stage 8's bad driving.
Frederick the Great
into a ditch on a descent. I'm not sure anyone would
have noticed if it were a shear drop into a ravine.
--
Old Fritz
Ryan Cousineau
That would have been worse, but on one hand riders tend to pick their
crash escape routes based on reducing harm. In other words, the
Astanas went off there (given the bad bodge-up of the corner everyone
was making) because it was a ditch and not a ravine. Fofonov emerged
unscathed, but Vino had the bad luck to find a tree on the way down.
Had it been a ravine, they would have probably tried another exit:
maybe just max braking and pile into the back of the riders ahead.
That's usually the most popular choice in these circumstances.
Not that bad things don't happen on descents (RIP Wouter), but for
that matter many of the sheer drops that are actually on ProTour race
routes are not that sheer. The last few fatal racing accidents I can
remember were from hitting something hard that wasn't far from the
road at all. Beloki's famous career-ending hip break came from hitting
the road. Someone here (Benjo?) will remember better than I, but the
last fatal bike-racing incident where the deadly element was, in
essence, a fall from height, may have involved a race caravan vehicle,
not a racer*. Of course, this leads into an enjoyably pointless debate
about what constitutes an injury due to a fall off a cliff or not: did
Vino break his femur because he hit a tree, or because he fell on a
tree?
The scariest-looking descents may not be where the worst accidents
happen. The least fatal kind of descent would be one where the
switchbacks came too quickly for riders to build up much speed: they
might be terrifying and tetchy, but any crash at 40 km/h is much
different from one at 70 km/h.
*Just looking at le Tour, racer Francisco Cepeda died after falling
into a ravine in 1935. The doubly-fatal Virot/Wagter motorcycle crash
in 1957 was described in one report I found as a crash down a ravine:
http://www.sports-reference.com/olympics/athletes/vi/alex-virot-1.html