Tour de France and criminal law

I wasn’t thinking about criminal law or reckless endangerment when I was watching Stage 14 of the Tour d’France until, at the top of the cyclists’ second mountain, one of the spectators threw sharp carpet tacks on the road and flatted 30 cyclists’ tires. Unbelievably dangerous and only by the grace of God not deadly. Robert Kiserlovski from Team Astana went off the road and broke his collarbone. The Tour d’ France at times has up to 198 riders together in a group and when one bike goes down it more often than not takes another bike down with it. As these riders coming down the mountain are going between 40 and 50 m.p.h. it’s easy to understand how easily someone could have died from doing something as stupid as throwing carpet tacks into the middle of a bike race. I don’t know French law but Maryland criminal law defines reckless endangerment as engaging in “conduct that creates a substantial risk of death or serious physical injury to another; . .” What happened at the Tour was clearly criminal and here’s hoping they put whoever did it in the dungeon of one of those scenic castles that the cyclists have been riding past.