No fairytale ending for Kristoff as career finishes with crash

Cycling doesn’t tend to do fairytale endings. The retiring Alexander Kristoff travelled to the Tour de Langkawi hoping to sign off with a century of victories, but instead he ended his career with a crash 110km from the finish of the penultimate stage.

It’s a cruel game, and Kristoff had long accepted as much. He hangs up his wheels with 98 wins to his name rather than 100, but it does nothing to diminish his remarkable career.

“It’s not the way I wanted to end the race or the career, but cycling is a brutal sport, and it changes fast,” Kristoff said in an interview for his Uno-X Mobility’s squad social media. “Yesterday I was sick, today I felt a bit better, but then I go down very hard. That’s life, but I will not dwell too much about it… Life goes on. I had a good time here until the crash.”

Kristoff explained that he lost control of his handlebars at high speed as he dispensed with a gel wrapper in the waste zone on Saturday. 

“Just when I’m not watching the road, and with one hand on the handlebar, I hit bad tarmac, and I think my handlebar just turned,” said Kristoff, who sustained cuts to his hands and arms. “The hand is quite bloody and full of holes, and the arm is also bad, so it was more or less impossible to hold the handlebar with this condition.”

Kristoff had come a narrow second to Matteo Malucelli (XDS-Astana) and he had hopes of clocking up those elusive 99th and 100th career victories on the final two days in Langkawi. 

The 38-year-old signalled his intention to retire earlier this year, and he endured disappointment in July when he was omitted from the Uno-X Mobility selection for the Tour de France.

He enjoyed a fitting farewell to racing on home roads in August, however, when he won a stage of the Arctic Race of Norway. That victory heightened hopes that he might notch up a century before retirement, but he was unable to add to that tally in the final weeks of the season.

Kristoff has thus brought the curtain down on a lengthy career in which he clocked up at least one victory in each of the past fifteen seasons. After a spell at BMC, Kristoff’s career took off in earnest when he joined Katusha in 2012, and he won the sprint for bronze at that year’s London Olympics.

Kristoff would go on to win Milan-San Remo in 2014, the Tour of Flanders in 2015 and Gent-Wevelgem in 2019, and he also claimed four stages of the Tour de France, wearing the yellow jersey after he won on the opening day in Nice in 2020.

After spells at UAE Team Emirates and Intermarché-Wanty, Kristoff enjoyed a homecoming in 2023 when he signed with Uno-X Mobility, helping them to secure their first invitation to the Tour de France.