The Movistar Team have announced significant improvements in the health of star rider Juan Mauricio Soler, with the news that doctors are reducing his medication and no longer consider his condition to be life-threatening. The 28-year-old Columbian pro was seriously injured in a fall in the village of Gloten, 11 km into the sixth stage of the Tour de Suisse on Thursday June 16 – he suffered multiple fractures, but, more seriously, the crash left him with a significant bleed on the brain. He is being treated at the Hospital St. Gallen in Switzerland, from where Team doctor Alfredo Zúñiga has reported: “He has begun to make light movements and tests seem to rule out spinal injury, although we should be aware of further studies. Now we have to see the evolution of a possible neurological damage.”
The accident came hard on the heels of the tragic loss of Movistar’s great Catalan rider Xavier Tondo who was killed after a freak accident in his garage on May 23; which in turn came only weeks after the death of Belgium’s Wouter Weylandt during the Giro d’Italia.