Australia's sprint star Caleb Ewan has suffered again on his miserable Tour de France, injuring his knee in a fall as Dane Mads Pedersen won the 13th stage.
Caleb Ewan's wretched fortunes in the 2022 Grand Tours have continued with the Australian sprint star suffering a heavy fall on his unlucky 13th stage of the Tour de France.
The Lotto Soudal racer now faces an anxious evening to see if he's fit to continue the three-week race as he nurses shoulder and knee injuries from Friday's spill.
Ewan had battled through the previous 48 hours of mountain toil to set himself up for a crack at victory on a day for the sprinters between Le Bourg d'Oisans to Saint Etienne.
But with 70km left of Friday's 193km stage, the Sydneysider clipped the back wheel of a teammate's bike on a sweeping left-hand turn and came down heavily on his left knee.
Rising with difficulty, the bloodied Ewan, who'd already suffered one heavy fall earlier in the Tour when crashing into a hay bale, remounted and tried to rejoin the peloton.
But it proved too much as he sought shelter behind a team car, which earned him a ticking off from the race commissaires, and eventually had to give up the ghost at the foot of the Cote de Saint-Romain-en-Gal climb with about 50km left.
The "Pocket Rocket" ended up limping home one from last on the stage, some 20 minutes down on winner, Mads Pedersen.
"I don't know what happened," a rueful Ewan reported later. "There was braking in the middle of the corner, I had nowhere to go and touched the back wheel in front of me.
"My knee and shoulder are pretty sore for the moment, so hopefully it's alright - but we'll have to wait and see how it evolves later tonight."
It was another miserable chapter for Ewan, who was fancied to enjoy a big European summer in 2022 but who's yet to win a single stage in the Grand Tours this year after a similar luckless, crash-hit Giro d'Italia which he dubbed the "Giro from Hell'.
Twenty minutes up the road, Denmark's 2019 world champion Pedersen proved too strong in a final three-man sprint to claim his first stage win at the Tour.
He'd attacked from a group of six with 12km left, dropping three rivals before his final 250-metre blast also saw off British runner-up Fred Wright and Canada's Hugo Houle.
After two brutal days in the Alps, race leader Jonas Vingegaard, a compatriot of Pedersen, had a mercifully uneventful day in the pack, well protected by his Jumbo-Visma teammates.
Two-time defending champion Tadej Pogacar, who gave away the yellow jersey during the first big mountain stage at the Col du Granon, didn't try anything to recoup his two minute, 22 second deficit.
It's been a hugely successful Tour for Danish riders, who've posted three stage wins since the start of the race which began in their country's capital Copenhagen.
"I guess it's super nice to be a Danish guy at the moment," leader Vingegaard smiled.
Vingegaard's real tests still await, with the general classification battle set to resume next week in the thin air of the Pyrenees before the race ends in Paris in nine days.
Australia's leading rider remains Team BikeExchange-Jayco's Nick Schultz, 33rd overall at 57:12 down, while Michael Storer (Groupama FDJ) is 45th and Chris Hamilton (DSM) 50th.
The other survivors are Simon Clarke (Israel-Premier Tech) 72nd, Michael Matthews (BikeExchange-Jayco) 95th and Ewan, who's 156th of the remaining 157 competitors.
