The first thing that crossed his mind when he realized he’d misjudged a turn during a bike race in the French alps and was about to crash into a guardrail at 70 kilometres per hour was to avoid sliding along the metal barrier.

Sure, it might slow him down or stop him. But that can get ugly because the edge at the top is thin and sharp.

“I’ve seen riders that kind of slide on it and it’ll just slice you open,” Carson Mattern says. “People get their legs just filleted open sometimes.”

So when he went airborne and avoided that fate during a stage of the Tour de l’Avenir just over two months ago, he breathed a short sigh of relief. That messy possibility wasn’t going to happen. Not to him. Not this time.

Carson Mattern is fitted with a neck brace in Grenoble after a bicycle crash that fr

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