Timmy Duggan has had a rough start to the year. Today, Jonathan Vaughters described Duggan’s luck so far in 2010 as a glass of lemonade with a few too many lemons, following a crash at today’s Amstel Gold Race, which resulted in a broken collarbone.
Duggan had just returned from an early season crash, which had the effect of ending the start of his season and extending his off-season: he went down in a messy spill on rain slickened roads on the final day of the Tour of the Mediterranean in February. The result was a broken shoulder socket, or as Duggan notes on his website, JustGoHarder.com, a “fracture of the Glenoid Fossa to be precise.”
Duggan spent the next two months recovering, repairing, and returning to form before making his comeback at the GP Indurain, which he followed with the Pais Vasco, then a trip to Belgium for the Brabantse Pijl, and today’s fateful trip through the Dutch Ardennes, Amstel Gold.
Duggan has been an American hope for a number of years now and one of the only wire to wire members of the now Garmin-Transitions team. Duggan has had a history of major setbacks, highlighted, or rather low-lighted by his catastrophic wreck in the 2008 Tour de Georgia, which very nearly ended his career and left him with severe brain injuries, injuries that took the better part of a whole season to recover from. Duggan came back, faster than ever though in 2009, and nearly took Stage 8 in the Dauphine Libere, coming up second to Stef Clement in a two-up sprint.
Duggan still hopes to start in his first Grand Tour in 2010.