Tour De France Spectator Taking Selfie Causes Huge Crash At Stage 15

When you are taking a selfie, try to practice some selfie-awareness and some selfie-control. On Sunday at the Tour de France 2023, a spectator decided to use a smartphone to take a self-portrait photo alongside the riders. That turned out to be not so smart because the riders were kind of competing in a bicycle race at the time. In the process of taking the selfie, the spectator’s arm clipped the handlebars of American cyclist Sepp Kuss. That caused Kuss to go down leading to a massive pile-up of about 20 riders during Stage 15 of the race and perhaps a lot of cussing along the way.

NBC Sports Cycling posted a video of the selfie-inspired crash on Twitter:

The BBC quoted Kuss as saying, “There was a narrowing in the town and a spectator in the road, and I guess he just clipped my handlebars.” Kuss added, “Luckily I’m OK and hopefully the other guys in the crash are all right. It’s not ideal.” Yes, having a spectator cause a 20-rider crash just to get a photo is certainly not ideal.

Fortunately, no one seemed to get badly injured as a result. All of the riders involved in the crash did manage to complete Stage 15, which consisted of a 179 km route from Les Gets les Portes du Soleil to Saint-Gervais Mont-Blanc in France. The Netherlands’ Wout Poels, who was already several minutes ahead in the breakaway at the time of the crash, ended up winning the stage.

After the crash, several cycling teams posted some umm-maybe-you-should-be-more-aware-of-your-surrounding warnings on social media. For example, here’s what Dutch cycling Team Jumbo-Visma tweeted:

As you can see, cycling enthusiast Phillip Martindale responded by saying that spectators were reaching out and touching cyclists in the middle of the race. Umm, while it may be touching to be at the 110th edition of this world famous bicycle race, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should touch the riders.

This wasn’t the first and certainly won’t be last accident caused by a selfie. In fact, expect the number of selfie-induced accidents to keep increasing each year as selfies become more and more a part of daily life. A 2018 publication in the Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care described what resulted when a team from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and IIT Kanpur in India used Google to search for keywords such as “selfie deaths; selfie accidents; selfie mortality; self photography deaths; koolfie deaths; mobile death/accidents.” They found 259 deaths-by-selfie in 137 accidents from October 2011 through November 2017. The average age at death was 22.94 years. This was more of a you-got-male situation with 72.5% of the people dying being males and 27.5% female. The most common causes of death were drowning, being hit by a moving vehicle, and falling while talking a selfie. As a result of their findings, the authors of the publication recommended that “No selfie zones” be declared in different tourist areas.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia maintains a “List of selfie-related injuries and deaths” that includes “serious injuries and deaths in which one or more subjects of a selfie were killed or injured before, during, or after taking a photo of themselves, with the accident at least in part attributed to taking the photo.” It’s an assorted gruesome list of falls, drownings, electrocutions, gunshot wounds, animal mauling, collisions with trains, cars, and other vehicles, and various other mishaps. And surprise, surprise, this list keeps getting new entries each year.

Keep in mind that both the study and the Wikipedia list have relied largely on news reports for their tallies. For every selfie death or serious injury that makes the news, there could be many other injuries and accidents that don’t. At this point, selfie injuries and accidents have been largely selfie-reported—meaning that there’s no formal mechanism that requires people to report such issues to authorities, at least in the U.S. In most cases, someone has to voluntarily step up and say, “Yes, I was taking a selfie at the time.” And doctors in the Emergency Department may not routinely ask, “Did you happen to be taking a selfie at the time?” So, many such selfie-related incidents probably go unreported. After all, people may not be raring to say, “I’m going to tell everyone about the havoc that I caused simply because I wanted more ‘likes’ on social media.” Such “likes” may not pay for medical bills or bail.

While there are no selfie-police out there, it is important to self-police when to take selfies. When you cycle through social media, you probably see a lot of selfies being posted. There may be the temptation then to say, “Hey, but my life is cool, too,” and to go out of your way to capture how cool that life is with a selfie that you can then post and get oh-so-valuable comments like “Your life is so great.”

But before taking any selfie, be selfie-aware of your environment. Ask yourself what your selfie-worth may be. Is it worth risking injury or damage to get that selfie? Is it really worth causing, oh, for example, a 20-rider crash in the Tour de France just to show other people that you were there? Well, a lot people now know that the spectator who caused the crash was actually at the Tour de France 2023. And in this case, that’s probably not a good thing for the spectator.