You can see that being a professional cyclist on the Tour de France has its disadvantages. All that cycling, for starters. Then there’s the possibility of finding yourself converted into a temporary bike-rack for anything up to seven other competitors’ machines in some horrendous pile-up or other, not to mention the high risk of inadvertent wounding by well-meaning spectators.

One year a race leader required extensive bandaging after being (as the commendably unhysterical James Richardson, of British Eurosport, put it) “slashed by a promotional cardboard hand”. This has to rank up there with Spinal Tap’s “bizarre gardening accident” in the all-time league table of unlikely life-endangering misadventures.

On the plus side, though – fantastic medical care. The other day, along a B road in rural Belgium, we watched agog as a doctor applied a plaster to the knee of a wounded cyclist. Big woo, you might say. But the cyclist was on his bike at the time and the doctor was administering to his patient by leaning out of an open-top Peugeot that was going at about 25mph. (The Peugeot wasn’t being driven by the doctor, we should add – although it’s a trick we would like to see.)

Now, I don’t care who you are or what private medical plan you are paying in to, but that is premium healthcare of an order the rest of us can only dream about. It’s bad enough these days trying to get a doctor to visit you at home. Try getting one to visit you on your bike.

Of course, in the first days of the 2007 Tour, the doctor has been one of the busiest participants. He certainly would have been in for a crowded surgery in his Peugeot after the stage-two smash on the finishing straight in Ghent, pictures of which, at varying speeds and in varying degrees of close-up, have since been on heavy rotation in the coverage of ITV and British Eurosport.

We have used this space before to propose that televised sport offers no spectacle more leg-crossingly horrible than a bike crash and our confidence in this position has hardly been diminished by those few seconds of road-wide, chain-throwing mayhem – the ultimate melding of man and machine, but in a bad way.

Boxers beating each other to a pulp, rugby union internationals leading with the studs and then beating each other to a pulp – somehow it all pales into insignificance beside the wince-inducing sight of poorly armoured human flesh in a free-form, skittering collision with tarmac and sharp bike parts. Certainly I can’t remember seeing anything on the television recently from which I have shrunk away so instinctively, with the possible exception of KT Tunstall’s performance at Live Earth.

And yet, amazingly, the worst that anyone suffered in that spoke-rich chaos was a broken thumb, although, as if attempting to compensate, the thumb in question turned out to be broken in five places – quite a spectacular amount of wounding for a single digit. Does a thumb even have five places?

Apparently, another rider briefly wondered whether he had broken his collarbone, only to remember that it had been surgically replaced with a piece of titanium after an earlier accident, meaning that, technically, he no longer had a collarbone to break. Well, it’s easy to forget these little details, I guess, especially if you’re a professional cyclist. And anyway, no doubt the doctor was drawing alongside in no time and pulling out the case notes to refresh his memory.

Our urgent question for the health authorities is: when is David Duffield going to rejoin the peloton? British Eurosport’s legendary commentator and undisputed king of the ramble has thus far been working as an analyst from a position in the channel’s bravely yellow studio. Putting him on-camera has its advantages – not least because Duffield is one of a diminishing number of sports presenters prepared to wear a check jacket over a check shirt, the checks in question being wildly different in scale and colour. But we badly miss the live rambling. He’s not worried about getting hurt out there, is he? He shouldn’t be. They’ve got mobile doctors in open-top cars, you know.

Medical staff were, blessedly, uncalled for at the Spoony Golf Classic (Sky Sports 2). What do you mean, you’ve never heard of the Spoony Classic? Every year, around his birthday, the fabled disc jockey and part-time presenter of 606 on Radio 5 Live – probably the world’s worst football phone-in – gathers his football-related pals (Lee Dixon, Jamie Redknapp, Tim Sherwood, all the greats) for 18 holes and dinner, and all “fer cheridee”. And Sky Sports films it, for all the world as though it were summer and they had nothing better to do.

Classic and then some. Bob Hope and DJ Spoony: one struggle.