CRADDOCK Lawson

General
LANTERN ROUGE
He fractured his shoulder on the opening stage of the 2018 Tour de France, but he went on to complete the race and crossed the line as the 'lantern rouge' [the lowest ranked rider to finish the entire Tour]. Earlier in the Tour he had announced that he would donate 100 USD for each stage he finished to the Greater Houston Cycling Association in Texas, United States of America, which was raising funds to rebuild the Alkek Velodrome that had been damaged by a hurricane in 2017. Members of the public also began donating, and through his efforts a total of more than 350,000 USD was raised. "I had a lot of muscles in a lot of different places that I didn't even know were there until they started hurting so much. A few of the stages I was pretty down. But you can sit there and dwell on how hard it is, and how rough you have it, or you can focus on the fact you are racing the Tour de France. I grew up racing in [Alkek Velodrome]. So I wanted to give something back. It made all the suffering worth it." (efprocycling.com, 30 May 2021; theguardian.com, 06 Aug 2018)