I’m often asked if I’m hoping my kids get into cycling. It’s a question I’ve found difficult to answer.
On the one hand: yes. But then again, I know it’s a dangerous sport, and while those dangers rarely entered my mind in competition … it’s my kids. Ultimately, I usually reason, if they did decide to hop on a bike, I’d certainly support them, without being pushy. But it has to be their decision.
I fear the next time I am asked that question the answer will have changed. As a parent assessing a sport, I see a governing body arguably negligent in its approach to making meaningful improvements to rider safety. As such, I find myself edging towards a hope that my kids never inquire about the optimal way to pin a race number.
Professional cycling stands at a critical crossroads. While other high-speed sports have transformed their safety protocols, cycling’s governing body continues to implement superficial changes that don’t do enough to address the sport’s fundamental dangers.
Now, following Muriel Furrer’s fatal crash at the UCI World Championships, the sport faces an urgent choice: either revolutionise its approach to rider safety or accept that tragic incidents will continue to occur in service to tradition and spectacle.
Following Furrer’s passing, UCI President David Lappartient said “it’s not always the organiser’s or the UCI’s fault” that crashes happen. While true, it is the UCI’s job to reduce their likelihood and severity and make sure processes are in place to ensure a rider receives the correct treatment when they do.
Such is my disillusionment with our governing body’s lack of action I find myself less inclined to even watch racing, never mind participate. It’s not that the UCI is responsible for Furrer’s death; there is currently no evidence any UCI intervention could have prevented her crash or injuries. We also don’t know if she might have succumbed to her injuries even if she had been attended to sooner. Furthermore, crashes will always happen. They cannot be entirely eliminated. But the UCI is, in my opinion, guilty of not doing enough to reduce the risk of crashes, and mitigate the impact of said crashes. As such, the UCI is guilty of not giving Furrer any extra chance of surviving.
I want to discuss what interventions could ensure every rider is given every chance of, first, not crashing and, secondly, given every chance of survival when they do. The following is what I believe is not only possible but now a requirement to improve rider safety and mitigate the seriousness of crashes when they do happen. I want to look at ways of reducing the frequency and severity of crashes while ensuring the sport is harnessing every opportunity possible to ensure riders, and other stakeholders, are given every opportunity to survive a crash and receive the best treatment.
I was going to number these interventions, present them as steps, but that would prioritise one over the other. If the question is which is most important or which comes first, the answer is all of them.
Motorsport may have the answer: live and learn
I don’t have to look far for inspiration on what looks like best practice. The FIA is far from perfect, and Formula 1 likely has more budget per race than the entire Tour de France peloton combined, but the fastest motorsport on the planet that lost, on average, over a driver per season for a 30-year period now has a markedly improved safety track record with four deaths in the past 30 years.
Arguably, and most unfortunately, it took the loss of the greatest driver in the sport’s history, Ayrton Senna, for the sport to reset its approach to safety. Crucially, though, the sport did make those changes, and today I can watch drivers hit 350 kph inches from each other, and in close proximity to concrete walls and spectators without worrying we could lose someone to a crash at any moment. I agonise over the idea it might take the passing of a similar champion in cycling before the UCI makes a similar safety-first position.
The various steps that F1 has taken don’t really make for a relevant comparison for a number of reasons: money, mostly-enclosed vehicles, and purpose-built racing circuits, to name but a few. But nevertheless, cycling can achieve so much with a similar safety-first mindset.
The comparison I do want to make, though, is the contrast between how F1 and the FIA investigates serious incidents and quite often introduces new car or track specifications soon after, designed to either eliminate or mitigate the risk of a similar incident happening again. The UCI must implement a similar process. Time and time again we see harrowing but arguably predictable crashes in the highest echelons of our sport, and time and time again nothing changes.
Downhill finishes, finish lines on corners, treacherous descents to the finish, that stage finish in the Tour of Poland, that descent in Dwars door Vlaanderen and the other in Itzulia Basque Country this year, even the descent that took Wout van Aert out of the Vuelta; they are all segments of courses that either led to crashes in the past, were identified as potentially very dangerous, or had obvious flaws, sometimes all of the above. In fact, in the Tour of Poland example, downhill finish are prohibited by the UCI rules, but yet it remained and was a contributing factor in the crash that almost cost Fabio Jakobsen his life.
As a sport, I feel we are all too often more concerned about how a safety intervention will affect the race, the results, or the spectacle, not to mention host town/sponsor requirements, tradition, or whatever it is that makes cycling what it is. This is exactly the safety-second type mindset that needs to change.
Road racing happens, as the name suggests, mostly on public roads. Nobody wants to see that change. But that doesn’t mean we can’t optimise courses for safety and it’s a pretty simple two-step process to do so.
First, fully implement, and potentially review, the UCI’s rules on courses and finishes, like the rule that already prohibits downhill sprints and corners in the finishing straight, and update the rules to prohibit mountain descents to finish lines. Yes they add jeopardy and test another element of the riders’ skillset, but is a little extra entertainment for us at home worth the risk for the riders?
Second, a former rider should be included in the pre-race course inspection, which one sometimes wonders if these happen at all, and that former rider should also form part of the jury on race day.
That’s not to question any commissaires’ expertise, but rider course safety concerns currently fall on deaf ears, be it in Grand Tours, Classics, or even the World Championships. Thankfully, Adam Hansen as president of the CPA is shouting louder than most, but riders need another former rider advocating for them from an official position on the UCI and organisational side of the equation.
Such a position, given the appropriate authority, could provide additional experience garnered within the peloton tasked solely with identifying potential hazards and, again, with the appropriate authority, i.e. a veto on the inclusion of any element of the course, intervene when necessary.
Said rider and commissaires should visit and review every course before races start. Ideally weeks or months in advance, but early on race day as a minimum. It seems impractical, maybe even impossible, but viewed through a safety-first lens, it seems ludicrous such practice doesn’t already exist or at least not to a suitable level given some of the courses that slip through. If races cannot change their courses, up their standards, or the finances don’t exist, then, I’d argue, it’s better we lose any race than a single rider more.
The major crash in Itzulia this year happened on a corner identified by a local rider as a potential hazard due to roots and surface imperfections on the high-speed corner. If a rider had had the opportunity to flag that potential issue in advance of the race reaching that corner, the race could have been neutralised through that section, without a single rider having to leave the race in an ambulance. But without a safety-first approach and empowering interventions to improve rider safety, such obvious potential issues are either ignored week in week out in cycling or concerns are raised too late and usually after the fact.
The Vuelta descent that took out Van Aert was the scene of a similar crash just three years ago, seemingly nothing was done to prevent a repeat this year. The treacherous road surface that led to a mass pile-up in the Dauphiné would have been easily spotted by an experienced rider driving ahead of the race. Sure, such interventions might interrupt racing, but would we prefer to lose a minute of action in Itzulia or a proper GC showdown at the Tour de France and countless injured riders? I’ll take the former.
It’s not just World Tour riders and racing where the sport requires better safety. While the focus for this article is on road racing, track racing provides another example of how we fail to learn from serious incidents.
Raced on relatively compact, purpose-built facilities, track racing is arguably the easiest discipline to make interventions to and the closest thing we have to a motor racing circuit, even if the two banked corners and short straights looks nothing like an F1 track.
Yet nothing has been done to mandate track barrier safety in the two years since a crash at the Commonwealth Games saw England’s Matt Walls career over the railing along the top of the banking and into the crowd. That incident came 16 years after Isaac Gálvez tragically succumbed to his injuries after crashing into the railing around the top of the track at the Ghent 6 Days. Furthermore, in the time since that Commonwealth Games crash, Malaysian rider Dahlia Hazwani Hasyim narrowly avoided serious and potentially life-threatening injuries in a remarkably similar crash at the 2023 Junior Track World Championships.
The Lee Valley Velodrome track has since added a transparent perspex barrier in consultation with the UCI, and the UCI has just last month updated its track specifications requiring all new velodromes requesting homologation after 1st July 2025 feature a 140cm tall outer safety fence (up from 90cm). Practically accepting there is an issue with the existing outer fencing safety without mandating all existing velodromes up their standards.
Just like the Lee Valley Velodrome bosses, it is often individual race organisers taking the lead. Flanders Classics springs to mind as a particularly proactive organiser with their relatively new finishing straight barriers designed from lessons learned in the aftermath of several awful crashes in the closing metres of sprint finishes. The organisers also removed the very descent that wrecked Wout van Aert’s spring campaign on safety concerns from the Tour of Flanders, yet Dwars Door Vlaanderen was free to keep it.
ASO is also taking some steps, introducing digital signage to warn riders of sharp corners ahead and other obstacles. But such isolated and random interventions are never enough.
Interventions like extending the 3 km rule just move the problem elsewhere. The yellow card system is only months old and already its application is inconsistent at best. The UCI needs to determine and implement meaningful, but admittedly difficult, safety interventions. It then needs to learn from the future crashes and accidents that will undoubtedly still happen, and question if anything could be done to ensure a similar crash doesn’t happen in future. Finally, the UCI must ruthlessly reject or remove sanctioned event status from races that don’t meet this new standard.
Better concussion checks
Nowhere is cycling’s race-first, safety-later mentality more obvious to me than when it comes to potential concussions. While the UCI has introduced concussion checks, 1) they are often not administered promptly, and 2) the debate still focuses on how we deal with the time lost by riders awaiting a check.
Of course, we want to retain the integrity of the race results, but we currently over-prioritise the spectacle, which should be secondary to the humans involved. Rather than wait for some perfect solution, let’s start by actually mandating and enforcing the check on every rider requiring such, and give them the time of the group they were with until we find a better solution.
But how would that work?
Potentially quite simply given today’s technology. The UCI must introduce a helmet approval process, and all helmets used in UCI-sanctioned events must be equipped with g-force detecting sensors that communicate with the race medical car. If a helmet registers a set g-force it alerts the medical car and the rider must then undergo a concussion test. Thus removing any subjectivity in who gets checked or chance of missing a rider requiring a check.
OK, I get that this sounds oversimplified, even far-fetched, but the technology exists. World Rugby has introduced g-force measuring mouth guards analysing every head impact in every game. Sure there are teething problems introducing the technology: players, teams, and doctors don’t trust the tech and react as such when asked to step off the field for a concussion check, and bluetooth connection problems have created other issues … but these snags are far from unsurmountable. Furthermore, and I’m no electronics expert, but I assume fitting the technology into a mouth guard inside a players mouth is more challenging than adding it to a helmet with simply more real estate to add such a device.
Specialized have already added the ANGi sensor as an option on its helmets. ANGi measures Angular and G-force impacts and connects to an iOS or Android device to send a message to select contacts. Many head units offer a similar service. Harnessing similar technology that does not require a connected cell phone could solve our concussion test challenge in one swoop.
Better yet, the UCI has a frame and wheel approval process through which all frames and wheels must be approved before they can be raced in UCI-sanctioned events. Is a similar process for helmets all that ridiculous? Given the frame approvals’ wholesale uptake by practically every manufacturer, a helmet approval process could also set a specific standard all helmet manufacturers are required to follow. That would replace the various tests and head forms helmet manufacturers currently use … and argue over.
Going back to F1 for a second, drivers all wear biometric gloves to monitor their vital stats during a race via a thin optical sensor in the palm of the glove. The sensor monitors and transmits the driver’s pulse and pulse oximetry providing vital information on a driver’s conditions and urgent requirements to first responders before they’ve even arrived at a crash scene.
Cycling could utilise existing heart rate straps and other wearables, in combination with the transponders that are already in use, to broadcast similar information to the medical car or a race control room in cycling. Furthermore, given our head units already track GPS-position, impact forces, power, and heart rate data, arguably it’s as simple as connecting our existing head units to a standardised transponder the UCI mandates for every race. Such additions are only a win-win, they might not directly make cycling safer but they can certainly help when a crash does happen and the rest of the time they could be used to provide engaging insights for viewers at home.
Radios to stay and more of them
Meanwhile, in cycling we have a governing body seemingly hell-bent on banning radios in the hope it could improve the racing action ignoring the undeniable fact that having a simple radio improves safety. Radios offer teams a chance to warn riders of obstacles ahead and riders to alert teams and teammates to things they have spotted or that they have fallen.
I raced through a radio ban in the amateur ranks and while I could argue the touted benefits of banning radios didn’t add up, the most ridiculous aspect of the ban was that even post-ban race organisers and commissaires would still ask our sports director during races to inform their riders of a hazard on the course. How said directors were supposed to do so without radios is anyone’s guess.
Fewer race vehicles
Let’s face it, in-race vehicles are a disaster waiting to happen. At best, motorcycles still influence far too many races, despite constant complaints, and at worst, the sheer number of them in some races puts riders at an increased risk sometimes riding too fast and picking poor moments to pass.
Despite every World Tour team now bringing countless vehicles to every race, we still require support vehicles to come through the tightly packed peloton to service the breakaway. Typically teams will send at least one vehicle ahead of the race, especially at Grand Tours, perhaps it’s time one of those vehicles is assigned with sitting just ahead of the peloton ready to drop into position as and when a breakaway is established similar to how neutral service currently works.
That’s before we even consider events like a civilian car entering the course during the recent Simac Ladies Tour time trial stage and Tre Valli Varesine.
All told, the UCI has a difficult question to ask of itself: Do we prioritise safety or some notional thing that “makes cycling, cycling”? Ultimately, I believe there is one, clear, right, and simple answer.
It will cost the UCI, brands, teams, and organisers money. Undoubtedly some races will disappear, arguably we have too many anyway. These interventions could and almost certainly will impact some race outcomes and there’s no guarantee riders and teams will welcome every intervention (many F1 drivers didn’t like the new head-protecting halo added to the cars, but their opinions changed soon after the first time its presence clearly saved a life). Work will need to be done to ensure buy-in from all stakeholders. But ultimately the question is simple: Does our sport accept events that risk participants’ lives? That’s a no from me.
As the UCI continues its crusade against all manner of other seemingly innocuous things: sock height, bar width, lever angles, and helmet sizes to name but a few, it has been negligent in its slow pace or complete lack of safety improvements. I’ve named just a few relatively simple possible interventions that will not eliminate crashes but could reduce the needless, repetitive, and sometimes worst crashes and injuries, while also ensuring riders are looked after when they do happen.
As I proofread this article I’m reminded of something Jonas Vingegaard said when asked if he is clean the eve of his second Tour win last year: “I don’t take anything I wouldn’t give to my daughter.” The UCI could do with asking themselves a slight variation of that same question: “Would I be happy for my daughter to race this race/course/corner/sport?”
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