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Broken collarbone ends Andrea Tafi’s Paris-Roubaix dreamAndrea Tafi - licensed CC BY SA 4.0 by Eric Houdas

Broken collarbone ends Andrea Tafi’s Paris-Roubaix dream

Italian had hoped to return to cobbled Monument at age of 52 to mark 20th anniversary of his victory
by Simon_MacMichael
Sun, Mar 17, 2019 21:05
4

A fractured collarbone has forced Andrea Tafi to give up his dream of racing Paris-Roubaix at the age of 52.

The Italian had planned to mark the 20th anniversary of his 1999 win in the cobbled Monument by taking part in next month’s race.

However, a crash in an amateur race yesterday resulted in Tafi breaking his left clavicle.

According to La Nazione, the incident took place during a race on his home roads outside Florence when a team mate riding ahead of him braked suddenly.

Even before yesterday’s crash, it was looking more and more unlikely that Tafi would be able to take part in the race due to difficulties in obtaining the necessary UCI licence and finding a time that would back his project.

Tafi, who retired in 2015 announced last October that he planned to try and return to the race known as the Hell of the North.

This year’s edition of Paris-Roubaix takes place in four weeks’ time on Sunday 14 April.

Andrea Tafi
Paris-Roubaix
Paris-Roubaix 2019
Simon MacMichael

Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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4 comments

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Chris Hayes | 5 years ago
1 like

I, on the other hand, will be riding Paris-Roubaix - the sportive, at least :-). Thinking about riding my Gios, which'll be a nice touch, but its a nasty, nasty, ride.   Training is a little behind schedule as the weather has been sh:t, but only 150km this year. And it's flat.  

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BehindTheBikesheds | 5 years ago
0 likes

clickbait headline, so no licence, no team and no place ... basically not anywhere good enough to even be remotely considered! We knew he had no team as far back as November last year, he reset his dealine to find a team for early Feb and again no-one wanted to touch him, so it was never going to happen even IF he got a racing licence! You remember the French Senate stating he had EPO in his blood samples as well right??

This should read as, 'former EPO doper/Paris Roubaix winner breaks collarbone in local granfondo race', and if you'd done a few minutes of actual digging you'd have found that Tafi wasn't even in the first group of 'Elite' M1/M2 etc riders, he was in the old man groups that departed with the women, but then it's too much to actually do some 'journalism' instead of basically copy paste.

http://www.langolodelpirata.it/classica-di-primavera-a-randazzo-e-marche...

he barely gets a mention, all this broken collarbone ends Roubaix dream is a joke, he wasn't good enough to even be in the lead race for the locals ffs!

Good that you can have a dream but this was delusional thinking, a bit like Gary Pallister saying he was going to turn out to play in defence for Man Utd in the champions league, utterly ludicrous!

Avatar
Freddy56 | 5 years ago
1 like

lie down man and stay down

Avatar
Organon replied to Freddy56 | 5 years ago
2 likes

Freddy56 wrote:

lie down man and stay down

Shut up you.

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