A few miles from the bunched start, one of the favourites, a local lad named Rex Woodruffe, fell badly when his pedal clipped an outcrop of rock on a narrow bend after he was boxed in to the inside running. The event was run over 15 by 8 mile laps and a 5 mile lap to finish it off. When he passed the start for the first time he had 117 miles to go. His body had been shredded by the fall when he skidded down the gravel edge of the road. His shirt and shorts were ragged and blood soaked. One pedal was bent from the contact with the ground which made pedalling difficult and painful.
There was never a thought in his mind of surrender and despite his obvious agony and the impossibility of making up lost ground, continued to chase the leaders who lengthened the distance away from him on every lap. His face grimacing in pain, he plugged on until the end of the race, passing other stragglers but never the leaders. When he finished in a state of pure exhaustion the blood had dried on him and one arm hung by his side, grotesquely swollen from a broken wrist. On arrival at hospital he was found to have suffered a broken collar bone and several busted ribs in the fall. |