ON ATHLETICS:Cycling has endured many darker days, many more cynical ones too, but none seemed sadder than the two days earlier this week following the death of Wouter Weylandt, writes IAN O'RIORDAN

JONI MITCHELL was right: you never know what you’ve got till it’s gone. I’ve been working from home these past couple of weeks, nursing a broken collarbone after crashing off my bike on Easter Monday. It still hurts, believe me, although the worst part is not being able to get back on my bike until the bone heals.

It’s what all cyclists know they must eventually do. This is not just part of any sporting creed, but indeed of life, that sometimes the best way of dealing with any setback is to ride on – and don’t look back. It’s just cyclists seem more in touch with the innate necessities of this than anyone else.

“Put me back on by bike,” cried Tom Simpson, after collapsing on stage 13 of the Tour de France, on July 13th, 1967. Simpson was 1.5km from the summit of Mont Ventoux, the highest and loneliest peak in Provençal France.

What the race doctors didn’t know at the time was that Simpson had consumed several shots of amphetamines and brandy before the climb – a fatal combination, as it turned out, as he was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital. It was a tragic end to Britain’s first cycling hero.

On August 11th, 1991, our own Seán Kelly was riding the Tour of Galicia when he got a phone call from home. His older brother Joe, who had introduced Kelly to cycling as a youngster, had just completed a 100-mile charity cycle around Carrick-on-Suir when he was hit by a car and killed.

Naturally devastated, Kelly returned home for the funeral, but could hardly have made any sense of it: he’d taken more risks and survived more near-misses in cycling than he could ever remember, and yet his brother just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Three days later Kelly was back on his bike, riding a criterium in Belgium.

On July 19th, 1995, during stage 15 of the Tour de France, Fabio Casartelli was among a small group of riders that crashed on the descent of the Col de Portet d’Aspet in the Pyrenees.

The 24-year old Italian, the reigning Olympic road race champion, hit a concrete block beside the road. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, and Casartelli was pronounced dead on the helicopter transfer to hospital. The next day’s stage was neutralised, and his Motorola team-mates were back on their bikes, crossing the finish line in front, side by side.

Two days later one of Casartelli’s team-mates, a young American named Lance Armstrong, won the stage into Limoges, pointing to the sky as he rode over the finish in an unforgettable tribute to the young Italian.

Indeed no country is more familiar with both the heroics and tragedies of cycling than Italy. Fausto Coppi, voted the most popular Italian sportsman of the twentieth century, and the first man to win the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in the same year, juggled heroics and tragedy his whole life.

In 1951, two years after his first double triumph, he was riding the one-day Giro del Piemonte along with his older brother Serse, his team-mate at Bianchi. Coppi had asked Serse to ride with him, as preparation for the Tour de France.

Towards the end of the race Serse crashed near the Turin velodrome, skidding across the road and banging his head on the pavement. He got back on his bike and rode to the finish. That evening, after complaining of a headache, Coppi took him to hospital, where his brother died of a cerebral haemorrhage.

Four days later Coppi was back on his bike, riding the Tour de France. In 1960, aged 40, Coppi died after catching malaria on a hunting tour in Burkina Faso. French cyclist Raphaël Géminiani, who also caught malaria on the trip, survived.

That remained possibly Italy’s defining cycling tragedy until exactly 33 years to the day after Simpsons’s death, when stage 10 of the 2000 Tour de France also finished on top of Ventoux. For Marco Pantani this was the beginning of the end: he found himself in a race to the top with Armstrong, who had somehow bridged a gap to the Italian in the ascent out of Bedoin.

Pantani crossed the line first, although they were given the same time. But from then on Pantani became hopelessly addicted to performance-enhancing drugs. Less than four years later he was found dead in a hotel room in Rimini, having consumed €20,000 worth of cocaine in the last two weeks of his life.

Even with all this in mind nothing prepared me for the tragedy and shock and incredibly chilling moments that unfolded in the Giro d’Italia earlier this week. Monday’s third stage from Reggio Emilia to Rapallo, with the testing climb at Passo del Bocca, seemed to me like the start of the race proper. I had Eurosport’s live coverage on in the background, and wasn’t paying too much attention until the pictures briefly stalled over a fallen rider, on the descent from Bocca, about 25km from the finish.

It looked like there was blood on the road, but like most people I only discovered later in the afternoon that Wouter Weylandt, the 26-year old from Belgium and part of the new Leopard Trek team, had been killed instantly at the scene.

It was, by all accounts, a freak accident: Weylandt was descending alone, at about 80km per hour, having been dropped by the leading group. He looked briefly over his shoulder to see how far the next group was behind him. Either his left pedal or left handlebar hit a small wall beside the road, and with that he was catapulted to the other side of the road – where the impact was fatal. Hugely popular in the peloton, Weylandt had, by shattering coincidence, won stage three in the Giro the year before.

There are many inherent dangers in cycling, yet it’s not a distinctly dangerous sport. Weylandt was the first rider to be killed in a major tour since Casartelli, and the last previous rider to be killed in the Giro was 25 years ago when Italian Emilio Ravasio crashed on stage one, and died a few days later.

What made Weylandt’s death feel tragic beyond words was the response of the peloton the following day, on the 216km down the Tuscan coast to Livorno. Each of the 23 teams spent about 10km at the front, turning the stage into a long, six-hour silent funeral procession.

“Just enough time to realise how lucky you are,” commented Team Sky rider Peter Kennaugh.

The Italians, typically, turned out in massive numbers, applauding respectfully along the way. Then, just before the end, Weylandt’s team-mates, along with his training partner Tyler Farrar, moved to the front and crossed the finish line side by side. Even watching on television it was incredibly stirring.

Cycling has endured many darker days, many more cynical ones too, but none seemed sadder than the two days earlier this week. On Tuesday evening the Leopard Trek team, and Farrar, pulled out of the race, but they’ll soon be back on their bikes. On Wednesday the rest of the peloton did exactly that, and the race and the riders rode on – Wouter Weylandt forever etched in their memory. You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone.