Dutchwoman Van Vleuten hurt in horror crash

There’s no medal for fourth place, the arbitrary cut off the Olympics places on success and, sometimes, failure.

Abbott got even closer to victory but the waif-like climber was agonisingly caught just 150 metres from the line.

Silver medalist Emma Johansson of Sweden and bronze medalist Elisa Longo Borghini of Italy posted the same time.

“So after, Emma just said, ‘Do it for Annemiek, ‘ and I said yeah, that’s right”.

“Obviously I’ve lost quite a lot of sleep and its been a hard time, but its not an excuse”. It took me a while to realise that, OK we have to get our heads back on the race and start the chase. I simply wasn’t able to climb with the best in the world.

One-time Olympic champion Chris Boardman led the criticism of organisers – claiming not enough barriers were protecting the riders and arguing the race was not safe. According to the cycling’s global governing body, the worldwide Cycling Union deems that “van Vleuten was “conscious and able to communicate”.

Van Vleuten left a cautious Abbott behind on the descent but suffered a horrific crash 10km from the end that left her lying in a heap.

“We knew this was way past this being a technical, this was unsafe”.

With three kilometres left, Abbott still maintained a 28-second gap; with one kilometre left, it was down to 10 seconds.

“It wasn’t entirely unexpected”, she added.

“I saw the 300-meters to go sign and I thought”.

“I’m really happy with the tactic that I had and the effort that I did”. I didn’t panic on the climbs, and limited as much as I could, my losses. “That’s what I’ve been working hard on, but that’s sport”.

Armitstead had been provisionally suspended by UK Anti-Doping on July 11 for three whereabouts “failures”.

The severity of her crash shocked all who were watching and many rushed to Twitter to wish her well. “If you wanted to win a medal we had to bring her back”.

Speaking to ITV News after the race, she said: “It was pretty brutal”. For that I can feel proud of myself.

The first half of the race, along a windswept coast and two circuits of the partly-cobbled Grumari climbs, belonged to 20-year-old Belgian Lotte Kopecky who stayed out in front alone for 70km before being caught.