Britain’s Lucy Buckingham topped the swim and bike at Ironman 70.3 Bahrain earlier today, but stalled on the run as she dealt with injuries sustained in a collision with a car on the bike course.
We spoke to Bob de Wolff, manager of Buckingham’s BMC Pro Try team, to find out more about the accident. He wrote in his email that the accident occurred near the 70km mark on the bike course. A motorcyclist was riding next to Buckingham to take footage. The highway was “divided with a portion of the highway closed for athletes to race and large cones separating the other two lanes for traffic flow.”
“Lucy believes the car may have collided with another car and veered into the cone, causing Lucy to fall onto the bonnet of the car,” De Wolf continued. “Overall, Lucy was very lucky that she was able to stay in the bonnet in the end and continue. She had so much pain in her lower back that she ended up having trouble running. She had it checked out in hospital. Fortunately, there was no major damage. The organization was very helpful in assisting Lucy and determining the cause of the accident.”
After leading the swim, Buckingham continued to improve her time against the women chasing her, reaching T2 with a 1 minute 40 second lead over Caroline Paul and 5 minutes 32 seconds ahead of eventual champion Kat Matthews.
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Buckingham was able to maintain the lead until 13 kilometers to go, but eventually fell back to seventh place.
Buckingham has two Ironman wins this year, in Warsaw and Knokke-Heist in Belgium, with a time of 70.3.
We have reached out to Buckingham and Ironman for more information on the accident and will update this article as more information becomes available.