The crash was awful and it was heartbreaking to see all of those riders, who will have trained so hard and put so much into their race preparation, lying injured in the road.
I will nervously admit to having been in a siituation a bit like sign woman though (I didn't have a sign!). DH is a massive TdF fan and I have come to enjoy it a lot too. I have watched countless stages on TV over many years. We went to watch the race set off from a local town when they were in Yorkshire a few years ago. We read all the official information about spectating, and loads of fan blogs so we would have an idea of what to expect. Knowing that the town centre would be rammed, we chose a spot in the suburbs which we thought would be quieter and which we could reach on foot. There were no barriers. Waited by the side of the road for a long couple of hours with nothing happening - I do remember some marshals in
high vis telling us all to make sure we were standing on the pavement.
When the race finally started, there was a random trickle of safety and promotion vehicles, unevenly spaced, who whizzed past us having just completed the caravan stage and obviously grateful to speed up and get onto the road. Then... nothing. We could hear cheering in the distance. Imagine you're in a crowd with people to left and right of you. You can't see the approach of the riders, even as they get close. You have no idea where they are or how fast they are coming towards you.
As the first motorbikes with cameras reached us, I instinctively craned my upper body out a little bit to see if I could see the riders approaching - only to withdraw sharply as the peleton thundered past us. Honestly they were like a train going past and they come out of absolutely nowhere - you don't see them coming if you're packed at the side of the road. And at the start, they're all tightly bunched, there are no race leaders to give you warning that they're coming through.
If I'd craned my neck a couple of seconds later, I could possibly have knocked against a rider. If, God forbid, I'd carelessly stepped a foot off the pavement onto the road, it would have been bad.
The peleton look so stately on the TV, their progress looks really predictable, the camera angles suggest that you would see them coming. Completely different to see them in real life. It was quite scary just how close and how fast they were, and how they just come at you from nowhere.
I don't know what I think about the woman with the sign to be honest. She was certainly stupid and the crash was awful.