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So what really happened to Alberto Contador's Specialized Tarmac yesterday at the Tour de France?

Dave Arthur tries to sort fact from fiction on the mystery (if it is) that's inevitably been dubbed 'Bikegate'

Mondays are rarely as thrilling as yesterday's stage 10 of the Tour de France which provided fireworks, drama and intrigue as race favourite Alberto Contador was forced to abandon after suffering a broken leg in a crash on the 163km stage. But if you were on Twitter, that wasn't the really big story, all attention was focused on the cause of a photo of Contador's broken Specialized Tarmac frame.  Did the frame snapping cause him to crash, seemed to be the general question that most wanted an immediate answer to. 

Unfortunately there were no TV cameras near Contador, instead the first TV viewers knew of the incident was when the director cut to a bloodied Contador standing at the edge of a road, photographers swarming around him and the race medic applying a bandage to a badly cut right knee. There was a bike in the ditch, but it appeared to be Nicolas Roche's McLaren S-Works team bike, and Contador limped on for another 18km on another spare bike. 

In the absence of of any evidence of what caused his crash, and the emergence of a photo of what appears to be his team bike snapped clean in two, speculation ran like wildfire through the social media network. We immediately contacted Specialized who have issued this response:

“Alberto crashed on a fast and straight part of the descent. He was reaching for his pocket and the bike was swept away under him probably because of a bump or hole in the road. Alberto was in the shape of his life and the entire team had our eyes fixed on the podium in Paris and the work we would have to do to get there”. -Bjarne Riis, Director Sportif, Tinkoff-Saxo

"Teammates were first to communicate the crash to the team car via race radio. Reports from Tinkoff-Saxo are saying their team car was passing closely to a Team Belkin vehicle and bikes on the roof racks became entangled between the two cars causing Alberto’s spare bike to be broken into two pieces. When a racer has a heavy crash, a mechanic will immediately provide a spare bike as a safety and performance precaution.

"As Alberto’s spare bike was destroyed, Nicolas Roche immediately offered his own race bike so that Alberto could continue the race. With the arrival of the second team car, Alberto was provided his own, secondary spare bike. Unfortunately after riding approximately 18km with what is now known to be a broken tibia, Alberto Contador was forced to abandon the 2014 edition of the Tour de France."

As we pointed out in our report last night though - the bike in the pictures clearly has Contador's race number on it - not Roche's and unless Roche was on a spare bike he is riding a McLaren Tarmac which has a completely different paint job.

But maybe Roche can is the best person to tell us what happened - at least in that initial crash. In his Independent blog posted early this morning he sheds some light on what actually happened. 

"As I helped Alberto up, I noticed his bike was broken [we assume he means crash-damaged - ed] and there was a stream of blood coming from a gash just under his right knee. His wound looked pretty bad but as a rider, my natural instinct was to simply hand him my bike and encourage him to keep going.

"Take my bike Alberto! Go, go, go!"

"Nico, I don't know if I can," he said as he hobbled out onto the road.

"Go and see. Try it, just jump on the bike!"

"As Alberto took off gingerly on my bike, I waited at the side of the road watching what seemed like everybody in the race pass me by. There were cars and groups of dropped riders everywhere, so I held Alberto's broken bike in one hand and waved the other one frantically in the air, afraid the team car would drive past in the chaos."

It seems then that Roche was there when Alberto crashed, stopped and like the dutiful domestique he is, gave the Spaniard his own bike and then stood at the side of the road with Alberto's crash-damaged bike waiting for the Saxo-Tinkoff team car. The bike Roche was holding at that point was intact, as the live footage from the race shows quite clearly. It's a bit less clear in this still, but obvious from the feed.

When the team car stopped to give Roche a spare bike, Contador's crash-damaged bike was put on the top of the car and a short while later, maybe as one team car was trying to overtake the other, Contador's other spare bike on top of the car (Contador has a spare bike on each team car, three in total) got tangled up with the Bianchi atop the Belkin team car, causing the frame to snap.

Above is what appears to be a photo of the bike Contador actually crashed on, the bar tape is covered in mud, and it's clearly not broken. The brake lever hoods are both bent around, as you'd expect in such a high speed crash. There's also no front wheel here, that presumably might have been damaged too. No, Contador came out of the crash worse, his jersey covered in mud and a broken leg. So what of the broken frame photo that did the rounds on Twitter?

The photo above does actually show a Saxo-Tinkoff mechanic untangling a Specialized team bike from a Bianchi atop the Belkin team car, backing up the claim by Specialized that this was the cause of the broken frame. It had nothing to do with Contador's crash, it was a separate incident, but because events unfolded so quickly and dramatically in the race,  many were led into making their own, inaccurate, conclusions.

That version of events makes sense, but there are still questions. For instance, Saxo-Tinkoff have publicly said that Contador's second bike was numbered up, which led to confusion when pictures of it in bits emerged. But as many people have pointed out, the broken bike has Contador's timing chip on it: Logic would dictate that it's the bike he started the race on as it's unusual for a spare bike to have a transponder on. That being said, it's not impossible and pictures of the Saxo-Tinkoff cars at the start show numbered bikes on the roof. Although we haven't seen a high-enough resolution image to check whether they have transponders too.

On top of all that our friendly materials scientist Trevor Allen has been in touch. He's currently doing a PhD on impacting carbon structures, so he feels well qualified to have a look at the aftermath...

Ignoring all comments and speculation, quite a bit can be read into the picture of the broken bike. Failure analysis like this is a widely used, and experts are regularly involved in court cases.

Two tubes of the bike have failed (obviously):

At top end near the seat tube - this appears to be a  tensile failure. The failure surface is quite complex due to the joins with the ST and stays. I suspect there is a mix of join failure and fibre failure in this location all rolled into one, but the key is tensile.

At the down tube - two points of interest: firstly the tube has failed at approximately 45 degrees to its axis. Unlikely a tensile failure, and torsion would be more of a rip - I suspect that is a compressive failure. Secondly the hawkeyed will also notice that the failure interacts with the bottle cage mount. This is will act as a stress concentration, and is possibly the initiation site of the DT failure.

So - tension at the top tube and compression at the down tube.

If you load a bike with a frontal impact – i.e. a horizontal load at the front axle – then you'd get just that: the fork is a long lever arm which will compress the down tube, and because of the rotation about the head tube junction you'll get tension in the top tube with failure occurring at the areas of highest stress.

I can't see how you could drive over a bike and cause that kind of failure of the tubes (why are the wheels and bottle cages intact and the tubes not crushed?). Dropping it from above your head when getting it off the car on to the front wheel would be the right load case, but I suspect the energy wouldn't be sufficient to cause that failure; having the rider on the bike increases the impact energy significantly because of the added momentum in the collision.

If I was asked to look at that bike in my job and guess how it failed, I'd definitely say a big load in from the front. Here are three ways that could happen:

1) A massive pothole with a fistful of last minute front braking (possibly, but not so convinced) or the crash which occurred after the pothole impact or indeed a combination of the two (some damage caused through pothole impact - then said damaged carbon with some delamination hurtles into a tree/verge etc causing a snap)

2) One car drives in to/closely past in same direction another car and two bikes on the racks collide. Contador's bike is likely to be on the outside, as it's just been racked.

3) The mechanic has bike ready for Contador and Belkin drive through (i.e kind of what is in the picture), the bike gets tangled in the rack and there is a convenient tree/verge to support the rear wheel. If this was the case the man holding the bike was pretty lucky he didn't get wedged too!

I don't think the snapped bike caused the fall. Nor do I think the bike snapping in a big crash is necessarily a bad thing.

Latest update

This newly emerged photo provides a much better view of how the Specialized frame snapped as a result of becoming tangled with the Belkin team car rack. You can also see the bike clearly has a race number attached, and though it's not 100% possible to confirm, it does look like there is a transponder fixed to the chainstay. This is the most conclusive photo we have yet seen that shows how the frame suffered the damage, putting to rest the speculation that the frame snapped when he hit a pothole. At least for now...

This is one of the most bizarre incidents that we can recall in the Tour de France. Given the narrowness of the roads through the Vosges  though and the team car racks bristling with spare bikes, it's a wonder it doesn't actually happen more often.

So, Contador's bike didn't snap underneath him, as many thought has happened, or snap when he crashed either. Saxo-Tinkoff's official version of events raises a few further questions but there's nothing in there that can't really be explained. The damage to the bike is inconclusive: given that driving it into another car on the rack, and riding into a pothole, are both a large frontal load, you'd expect either to result in the failure we see.

We wonder what Contador will make of all the fuss, but we're sure he's got more important things on his mind. We wish him a speed recovery. 

Photo credit www.tinkoffsaxo.com

David worked on the road.cc tech team from 2012-2020. Previously he was editor of Bikemagic.com and before that staff writer at RCUK. He's a seasoned cyclist of all disciplines, from road to mountain biking, touring to cyclo-cross, he only wishes he had time to ride them all. He's mildly competitive, though he'll never admit it, and is a frequent road racer but is too lazy to do really well. He currently resides in the Cotswolds, and you can now find him over on his own YouTube channel David Arthur - Just Ride Bikes

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73 comments

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Abbie | 9 years ago
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I Just Hope He's Okay. So Sad he's out.

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dave atkinson | 9 years ago
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next up: #giletgate

 19

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BikeJon | 9 years ago
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Forget his bike. i heard a report that he had two crashes. The second one being caused by his hand slipping off the bars? One thing I noticed during the ITV 4 highlights end credits is that he clearly had gloves on when he was changing his shoes but he later was riding his bike without gloves. Just made me wonder if this was a contributing factor in this second crash.
....if indeed he had a second crash!

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Paul J | 9 years ago
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The photo of the Belkin car with Alberto's broken spare bike interlocked with Team Belkin spares seems pretty convincing.

Just to keep the story alive though, Nicolas Roche today wrote in his Indo column about the crash:

"As I helped Alberto up, I noticed his bike was broken and there was a stream of blood coming from a gash just under his right knee."

Roche was there before any one else, before any team car. Curious, isn't it? It's not impossible that the bike was broken before it hit the Belkin car.  3

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farrell | 9 years ago
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And 'Bollixed' could be either way, often dependent on the preceding words.

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crazy cats | 9 years ago
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At the end of the day- carbon is a wonder material! Light, responsive and engineered to different demands!
But if you are not a sponsored pro or very well heeled amateur how many buyers can differentiate between the manufacturer's descriptions - high modulus carbon fibre etc. etc, Rely on magazine reviews?
Metals-steel, aluminium and titanium have highly specified properties.
The reality appears to be that that Carbon Fibre is also a fragile material, not just on team car bike racks but also for everyday use!.

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royAB | 9 years ago
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Should have had a RoofScope.co.uk on the cars!

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farrell replied to dave atkinson | 9 years ago
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Dave Atkinson wrote:

next up: #giletgate

 19

Solved: http://road.cc/content/classified/123750-limited-edition-tinkoff-saxo-te...

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Paul J replied to Paul J | 9 years ago
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Oops, that was yesterday's column, and in today's column Roche says that by "broken" he meant the gear lever and dérailleur - not the frame. So, no contradiction.  1

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surly_by_name replied to crazy cats | 9 years ago
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crazy cats wrote:

Metals-steel, aluminium and titanium have highly specified properties.
The reality appears to be that that Carbon Fibre is also a fragile material, not just on team car bike racks but also for everyday use!.

This is stupidity. How many purchasers of metal frames go off and look up the properties of the metal that goes into their frames? And why are manufacturers of metal bikes more trustworthy than those who manufacture carbon frames?

All of you flat earth luddites who think that a broken carbon frame signifies the arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, you are correct, this is ragnarok, the end of days!

(Also - does anyone really think that Roche actually wrote the article that was attributed to him? He might have spent some time on the phone with his ghost writer, but most likely the ghost writer had to make do with an email and some twitter.)

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giff77 replied to Paul J | 9 years ago
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Paul J wrote:

Oops, that was yesterday's column, and in today's column Roche says that by "broken" he meant the gear lever and dérailleur - not the frame. So, no contradiction.  1

As I said yesterday. When an Irishman says something is broken he means it can be fixed. When it's banjaxed there's no hope. The great Nico never said banjaxed at the first crash.

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dave atkinson replied to Paul J | 9 years ago
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Paul J wrote:

The photo of the Belkin car with Alberto's broken spare bike interlocked with Team Belkin spares seems pretty convincing.

Just to keep the story alive though, Nicolas Roche today wrote in his Indo column about the crash:

"As I helped Alberto up, I noticed his bike was broken and there was a stream of blood coming from a gash just under his right knee."

Roche was there before any one else, before any team car. Curious, isn't it? It's not impossible that the bike was broken before it hit the Belkin car.  3

yes it is, because the live feed clearly shows Roche waiting with an intact bike, as outlined above.

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ecycled | 9 years ago
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Spectator caught this. Apparently it was a strategically placed frame pump by a disgruntled Katusha rider not picked to ride the tour.

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dwbeever replied to ecycled | 9 years ago
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Yep - Specialized about to go full "Belov" on this one....

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Leviathan | 9 years ago
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Gary Imlach had his grubby paws on the broken bike and the allegedly crashed bike. Both had 31 numbers. ITV said the broken bike tangled with the Belkin car/bikes and was not crashed.

Face it conspiracy nuts if Contador had done that to a bike* then got up and pedalled on with a broken leg then he IS a superman and all is forgiven, clemmy steaks and all.

*but he didn't so he isn't.

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giobox replied to Leviathan | 9 years ago
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bikeboy76 wrote:

clemmy steaks

 21

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hairyairey | 9 years ago
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Has no-one picked up on the obvious safety issues here? If there are so many bikes on the roofs of team cars that they can collide with them on overtaking why aren't the cars fitted with warning flags so that other cars don't get too close? Something like this - http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/07/retro-safety-and-clean-hubs.html (I haven't seen one of these for ages though)

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Beaufort | 9 years ago
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To get into this as deeply as folk are getting into it can only mean people have way too much spare time.

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dave atkinson | 9 years ago
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it's not great. but this is the point where roche is waiting for the team car after having given his bike to contador, who then crashes/stops on roche's mclaren bike a bit further on. the bike is clearly not broken.

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Gordy748 replied to dave atkinson | 9 years ago
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Dave Atkinson wrote:

it's not great. but this is the point where roche is waiting for the team car after having given his bike to contador, who then crashes/stops on roche's mclaren bike a bit further on. the bike is clearly not broken.

Perhaps, perhaps not. I've seen helmets look fine after a crash until their owners take them off... and they come apart in pieces.

In the subsequent shots the bike (a bike) is clearly broken, but the two halves are still somewhat attached. It's possible roche saw this, which is what we could be looking at here; a bike that looks in one piece that will come apart as soon as you lift it.

Equally it's possible it was the spare bike on the top of the car that was hit by the Belkin bikes and snapped under the pressure.

Either way, it's a simple fact of lfe that carbon fails, and when it does it fails catastrophically. Not that carbon has a monopoly on this; any lightweight bike will break, just not as dramatically if it's made out of, say, steel.

For me, the hilarity in all of this is how stupidly asful Specialized's PR department is. Apparently somebody in the USA saw the crash and started sending out the press releases without finding out the facts first. Morons.

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Malaconotus | 9 years ago
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If anyone goes back through the live coverage they'll see that the bike which Roche is holding at the side of the road, a minute or so before we see Contador off the bike being treated, does not have a snapped frame and does have a race number. This is surely the original bike which Contador crashed on.

Sorry I don't have the skills to upload a still of it. The footage shows it has a race number on but not which number, but this is surely the bike Roche is calling 'broken' and it is clear enough that the frame is intact.

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Cooks | 9 years ago
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I'm sure Lance Armstrong is involved. Somehow. He has to be.

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don simon fbpe | 9 years ago
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Quote:

We'll never know the full truth. Specialized mixing up their stories has put paid to that.

This.
I know what I know and I believe what I believe. And as soon as the press come out and tell us about the carbon fibres entering Contador's heart, we'll all know the truth.
Recuperarte pronto Alberto.

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themartincox | 9 years ago
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Why are they putting in the boot? to prevent the millions of comments that would be attached to images of broken frames from getting more fuel!

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surly_by_name | 9 years ago
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It wouldn't have happened if he'd not been wearing ahelmet. The helmet gave him a false sense of security you see.

Bert crashed. Is no longer in TdF. There's a broken bike frame in Tinkoff colours with Bert's number on it and a transponder. There are 3 teams on Specialized bikes. (With Cav's withdrawal on stage 2, Hernandez Blazquez' withdrawal on stage 6, and contadors withdrawal on stage 10, I calculate that means that Specialized bikes have a 99.6% (254/255) chance of finishing a grand tour stage without self destructing. I imagine this statistic will improve to the point where you can all relax about buying a Spesh by the time the TdF is finished. That's even before taking into account other grand tours/events.

Why are they putting the bike in the boot - because having cracked in half, it now fits? And it's probably dangerous to strap it to the roof because it will flop around as the frant half is no longer connected to the back half other than via the cables/chain.

Can we all just let this go now.

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gizgaz | 9 years ago
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Love a good conspiracy theory...

I replayed the coverage and you can work out where the broken frame timeline a bit more... Dunno if this adds to the confusion though.

Image 1: Contador's legs pictured behind the broken frame.
Image 2: Different angle I screen captured. You can just see the broken frame in the guys hand in the bottom left of the image. (In video you can see it's the bike). Watching the video onwards you can see he hands it to another team member from a team car up the road. He legs it up the road and shoves it in the boot of the other car, which is Image 3.

I do find it weird that the broken frame would be taken off another car at this point, to be shoved in the boot of the second team car.

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FJM1002 replied to gizgaz | 9 years ago
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Maybe because there wasn't enough room in the other car. No?

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Zee replied to gizgaz | 9 years ago
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gizgaz wrote:

I do find it weird that the broken frame would be taken off another car at this point, to be shoved in the boot of the second team car.

The bike is in two pieces so the roof rack won't physically hold it in place any more. Points of fixation are downtube (facked), rear wheel (fine-ish) and front fork QR (only fixed to back end of bike via gear+brake cables..so not great either).

So into the boot it goes to prevent the thing from bouncing down the mountain at the next hairpin.

edit. And that settles that ladies and gentleman. It's been a pleasure.

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giff77 | 9 years ago
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My take on it all.... Nico says Bertie's bike is broken after the initial crash. The Irish translation for this is "can be fixed with a bit of fettling and gives the grease monkeys something to do to while away they hours". Now, if Nico said banjaxed or fecked after the first crash this is at the other end of the scale and means beyond use and to be flung into a skip after anything reusable has been stripped off. So following the subtle nuances of Irish speak, the first bike was temporarily out of action and the bike snapped in two occured after Bertie had stopped the 2nd time thinking the McLaren was playing up. In the confusion the driver drove over bike two therefore banjaxing it. Simples.

I hope Bertie heals up and there are no complications after having cycled 18k on a broken leg. I know what he's going through having smashed my tibia and fibula back in March. The consultant said I did the right thing by not putting weight on it at the time.

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canyoncfslx | 9 years ago
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Maybe this adds to the confusion...

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