"On stage 5 I crashed and I was the first to fall in what quickly became a massive pile up. Miraculously nothing was broken but my neck didn't work properly and I had holes all over my body. Somehow I made it to the finish but I was too injured to be worked on by the physio that night, so the next morning I had to wear a neck brace to hold my head up. More worryingly, my right hand didn't work and that meant no rear braking and no getting food from my jersey pockets. We got around this by putting my race food in a cut open bidon and changing gear with my left hand. I also rode well away from the other wheels so I had a bit of space to manoeuvre. I ought to have stopped but it was the Tour and you just don't do that sort of thing. [..] Before the 1990s the usual weapons of choice, if you were willing to risk the side effects, were mainly cortisone or corticosteriods, and everything else was detectable. Most things came with an off-day or injury risk too which kind of limited the abuse. At the Tour, Greg and everyone at Z had gone from riding at the front of the race to being dictated to. We still had our end of Tour party in Paris, but as you can imagine, it wasn't any fun at all. [..] Hardly anyone climbed out the saddle and you had to pull a bigger gear to stay in touch. Bugno, Indurain and Chiappucci had progressed a massive amount and there were rumours of something new floating through the field."