Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 10, 1994                   TAG: 9405100093
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: B-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RANDY KING STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THIS TURN WAS A `DOOZY'

Paul Grisso has lived on Mount Chestnut all his life. He knows the steep, winding road that snakes down the mountain like the back of his palm.

"If anything is going to happen, you can bet it's going to happen here," said Grisso, waiting Monday morning for Stage 5 of the Tour DuPont to come blowing past his Mountain Top Orchards.

"This turn right here," said Grisso, pointing at a severely banked hairpin, "is the real doozy. Every once in a while we've gotten a car over the edge [a deep embankment to the left] and had to pull it out of the woods. As far as I know, we haven't had any bicycles over there yet."

Minutes later, they had one. Australian Brett Dennis, the first rider out of the box in Monday's time trial, descended into the nasty right-handed curve way too fast, couldn't persuade his bicycle to turn right and veered straight over the edge.

Dennis vaulted over his bicycle's handlebars and disappeared from sight. Several witnesses estimated Dennis was thrust some 15 feet into the air before landing 30 feet down the embankment. The 22-year-old amateur rider for the Australian National team got off the hook reasonably fortunate, sustaining only a dislocated right hip.

"He's lucky he didn't catch one of those trees head-on. That would have been bad," said Dr. William Beach of Richmond, a Tour emergency-crew physician who attended to Dennis until an ambulance arrived to transport the rider to Roanoke Memorial Hospital.

Writhing in pain on the mountainside, Dennis tried to describe what happened.

"The turn came up too fast . . . and I was going too fast," he muttered.

He was right.

Dennis, whose nickname is "Chicken," was anything but that heading down Mount Chestnut, hitting a speed trap located about 200 yards short of the treacherous turn at 41 mph. The next-fastest rider through the speed trap was Monday's third-place finisher, Lance Armstrong, who clocked in at 37 mph.

The bad crash punctuated a terrible Tour for Dennis, who also wrecked in Stage 1, leaving last year's fourth-place finisher in last place overall heading into Monday's time trial.

Dennis nearly had company minutes later, when teammate Henk Vogels barreled into the same curve too fast, laid his bike down and slid off the course. Vogels uttered a few profanities, dislodged his mount from a thicket, went back to work and came home a respectable 27th.