Race facing €6.9 million lawsuit after crash that shortened Nacer Bouhanni's career

Nacer Bouhanni and his former Arkéa-B&B Hotels team are demanding €6.9 million in damages from the Tour of Turkey, following the French sprinter's 2022 crash with a spectator that saw him break his neck.

The incident took place on stage two of the eight-stage UCI 2.Pro-ranked event, when the bunch careered into an unsuspecting spectator who was walking in the road.

Despite the crash taking place relatively early in the season, Frenchman Bouhanni did not race again in 2022. He returned in 2023, but with neck issues still plaguing him, he did not recover winning form, only managing four top-10s during the whole season. He retired at the end of 2023, aged 33.

Bouhanni has told French sports outlet L'Equipe that he still has physio on his neck every week and that he estimated the crash had shortened his career by three years.

The rider is seeking €2.7 million in damages from the Tour of Turkey's organisers, the Turkiye Bisiklet Feradasyonu (Turkish Cycling Federation), while the Arkéa team wants €4.2 million to make up for what it says is loss of income.

Bouhanni's lawyer argues that the accident would not have happened if the race organisation had adhered to the UCI's standards, while Arkéa team manager Emanuel Hubert said that the team had “lost a lot of points because Nacer was out for so long”.

Bouhanni turned pro with the French FDJ team in 2011, having completed a stint with the team as a stagiaire the year before, and started winning almost immediately, picking up a stage victory in the Tropicale Amissa Bongo in the January.

He had arguably the best year of his career in 2014, when he won stages in the Vuelta a España and the Giro d'Italia, and also picked up the Giro points jersey.

But Bouhanni's tangles with controversy made as many headlines as his wins, with much made of his lifelong practice of boxing. In 2016 he missed the Tour de France after breaking a bone in his hand during a fight with drunken revellers at a hotel, while his no-holds-barred sprinting style proved frequently problematic – in 2021, for example, he was disqualified and suspended for two months for pushing Jake Stewart into the barriers at Cholet-Pays de Loire, while at the Tour de France in 2017, FDJ rider Jacopo Guarnieri was moved to say: "He's a d**k, he's always making people crash. We know he's like that. He's probably upset with us because he always loses."

Bouhanni has also suffered his share of wrongs – he was subjected to "hundreds" of racist messages after the Jake Stewart incident and had to withdraw from the Scheldeprijs one-day race as a result.