Correction: an earlier version of this story said that EF’s Darren Rafferty attacked after Richard Carapaz’s crash; in fact, it was just before.
The UCI’s new yellow-card system has been in place less than a month but already has its first major test at the Vuelta a España.
In a race incident on Wednesday’s stage 11, three riders and the lead director for Decathlon-Ag2r La Mondiale were handed yellow cards by the Commissaires Panel for “obstruction by a rider in order to prevent or delay the movement of another rider” after one of its riders crashed EF Education-EasyPost’s Richard Carapaz. In addition to their yellow cards, rider Victor Lafay and director Cyril Dessel were also assessed fines.
It’s the harshest punishment yet in the very early days of the new yellow card system, which was conceived to improve rider safety. And it both highlights exactly why that system exists, and raises questions about the possible limits of its effectiveness.
The incident happened just as the race was finally calming down; after the first hour of racing went by at a 45 km/h clip, a large break finally went clear around 100 km to go and Decathlon riders massed across the front of the road to prevent further escapes. Carapaz, riding up the left-hand side, reached the front only to be blocked by a Decathlon rider (who the jury may have believed was Lafay, based on his harsher punishment) and pushed off the road, where he crashed.
EF general manager Jonathan Vaughters told Escape Collective that Carapaz wasn’t actually trying to attack; he had simply moved up front.
“He wasn’t trying to get to the break, because he’s third on GC; there’s a moment for that, but today wasn’t it,” contended Vaughters, who is not at the race but spoke with team personnel there. “According to Richard and Cristian [Rodriguez of Arkéa-B&B Hotels, who was immediately behind Carapaz] when Richard comes up, the [Decathlon] guy took his hands off bars and pushed Richard into the ditch, simple as that.” (Carapaz may not have been personally trying to make the break, but EF was one of the only teams to miss the move and immediately before his team leader’s crash, Darren Rafferty unsuccessfully attempted to get across.)
Decathlon officials told Escape the team would have no comment, but race leader Ben O’Connor posted on X to protest the penalties.
In a second post in the thread, he asked whether a rider riding in the gravel off the road to pass was not causing danger (Carapaz was on the asphalt and within the white fog line when contact was made.) O’Connor later deleted not only the specific posts, but his entire X account.
For their part, Vaughters said, EF disagrees; the punishment, if anything, was too light.
“I mean, for me that’s a red card,” he said of the Decathlon rider who made contact with Carapaz. (The UCI system does not use red cards, although two yellows are effectively the same thing; the system is currently in trial phase.) “Take the rider out of the race, take the team car off the race for a couple of days. Obviously the director was encouraging that behavior.”
Carapaz does not initially appear to be seriously hurt, said Vaughters, although he did lose 15 seconds at the finish to several other contenders and dropped to fourth overall. But Vaughters cautioned that the effects of crashes sometimes don’t become fully clear for days. “There’s no broken bones, but sometimes stuff crops up after the fact,” he said.
EF has appealed to the race Commissaires for sterner punishment, and Vaughters pledged to raise the issue with UCI management if that is denied, but he’s hoping for swift action. As of Thursday’s stage, there was no response about any additional penalties.
The UCI has been inconsistent on that front. In early April 2023, the sport’s governing body said it would investigate a similar blocking incident at the Tour of Flanders where DSM Firmenich held up the pack on a narrow road on a berg, causing riders at the back to have to stop; in some cases, they fell over. But no punishment was ever made public.
But its on-the-ground Commissaires can act quickly. At that same edition of Flanders, Filip Maciejuk was disqualified during the race for an incident when he lost control trying to pass in the gutter and took out a large number of riders (it was almost three months before the UCI itself levied further punishment against him).
The yellow card system may offer another tool. Once it is fully operational in January, any rider or staffer who receives more than one yellow card per race is disqualified from the event and suspended for seven days, for example.
But that doesn’t address how to handle team-wide safety incidents like DSM in Flanders or Decathlon at the Vuelta. If, like on Wednesday, multiple riders from a single team are assessed yellow cards for a single incident, is there any wider punishment?
And it raises questions about the role of blocking in general, especially when and whether it crosses the line to something more aggressive, and how the UCI’s yellow card system will and won’t address it. The UCI did not respond to a request for comment.
Blocking is a longstanding tactic in pro racing, employed for a variety of reasons. And safety isn’t the only consideration; sporting fairness is an issue as well. As Vaughters sees it, Decathlon employed the technique because the team isn’t strong enough to defend O’Connor’s overall lead with more conventional tactics.
And the line between accepted and aggressive is often a matter of interpretation. In Vaughters view, blocking “is sort of a grey area where if you have 10 riders stuffed across the road and nobody can get past, there’s nothing technically illegal about that. But as soon as the hands come off the bars and they start pushing people and yelling at people and wagging fingers and all the other crap they were doing today, it’s no longer blocking. It’s the equivalent of a holding or facemask penalty in the NFL.”
If the UCI intends sporting fairness to be a component of its yellow-card system that may actually make this particular issue easier to police: all blocking would be out of bounds. But the system is positioned primarily as a safety issue, which may leave it much more open to interpretation, and that raises the issue of whether it’s truly equipped to handle incidents like Wednesday’s.
Vaughters noted that the consequences could have been far worse: at higher speeds, with more riders involved, or even if Carapaz had crashed on the asphalt and not in the dirt. But as riders face progressively higher pressure to perform, and racing gets faster and more aggressive, he does think better rules and stronger penalties are needed.
Some of that enforcement needs to come from teams (Vaughters said he would find the kind of aggressive behavior seen on Wednesday unacceptable from his own riders). But some needs to come from the UCI. Either way, he said, “we have to fundamentally make riders understand that they can’t behave like that. This is an opportunity for the UCI to say, ‘OK, we’re going to take a new line on this and we are not going to tolerate aggressive rider behavior.’ We’ll see what they do.”
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