Assessed holistically, I think it’s fair to say that the start of the 2025 season has had its share of faux pas. I mean, the racing has been the racing; that’s fine. But in a year in which the sport’s governing body is talking a big game about improving safety and conditions for its practitioners, there are still plenty of things that A) shouldn’t be happening and B) aren’t anything to do with the riders themselves.
To recap:
- Cars driving on the course of Étoile de Bessèges – two days in a row! – leading to crashes and the abandonment of multiple teams.
- A high-speed gravel descent at Alula Tour, causing the race route to be shortened by 27 km after a neutralised section
- A speed bump with 100 m to go in a Tour de la Provence sprint finish, sparking a major crash
And perhaps the pièce de résistance:
- Riders routed into two different finishing chutes at the Volta ao Algarve, with the majority of the peloton sprinting for the win on the spectator side of the fence, while poor Filippo Ganna – a man actually on the race route – took the victory (only for the results of the entire stage to be nullified).
As startling (and toe-curling, and frequent, and negligent) as these incidents have been, though, I can’t help but feel that we can row the boat out a little bit further. Why gently insinuate blame of the riders for the conditions of organisers’ making when you can do it outright? Why restrict your fuck-ups to such humdrum mediocrities as vehicles pootling along amongst a racing bunch of riders? Where’s the imagination?!
As such, we’ve jotted down some suggestions for race organisers and the UCI to consider adopting for future races – some added flair, some added drama, some added ways to fail at keeping riders safe while ramping up the absurdity.
1.Find a roundabout (any roundabout) and just do a full 180, back to the start
Of the spectrum of road furniture available to municipalities – and by extension, race organisers – there’s something uniquely satisfying about roundabouts. Visually, they’ve got a lot going for them: they are round, one of the more pleasing shapes in the shape-oeuvre (yeah, Rhombus, I went there), and have exceptional televisual appeal as the peloton arcs around their comely curves.
Where disappointment can set in, however, is in the roundabout’s usual directional flow. Why use it as a swoopy way of going forward or to the side when you can take the infrastructure to its logical conclusion, turn the entire race around and just head back where you came from? There are countless reasons why the riders might want to do this: maybe they had a slightly less scungy Ibis Budget the night before; maybe it’s a bit closer to the dire regional airport they need to EasyJet out of that night.
Or maybe there’s scope to get some little kickbacks from the town hosting the stage start, creating a real-time bidding frenzy between the start town and the finish town for who actually wants the riders to end up there. My point is: there is untapped potential in the roundabout, and there are loads of them in play on a typical day's racing. Keep us all guessing about where we've been, where we're going, and why.
2.Through a McDonald’s drive through
Picture the scene: some pointless 1.1 race in Croatia or whatever, where red-checked flags are fluttering along a boulevard in the gentle breeze off the Adriatic. A small but eager crowd waits patiently to see who will take home the honours. Little do they know that the race organisers have planned a Very Special Sponsorship Activation with a local fast-food franchisee.
Just as the riders pass under the flamme rouge, a local actor dressed in a Grimace suit waves the peloton into a service lane off the boulevard. A red-roofed building lies a few hundred metres hence, Golden Arches rising resplendent on a roadside pole. The air fills with the squeal of brakes and terrified cyclists as the riders are routed into the drive-through, an abrupt hard right followed by another. Victor Lafay skids to an elegant stop alongside the speaker, which crackles to life. Lafay doesn’t speak Croatian, but he speaks the international language of “I would like an M&M McFlurry please”, which, fortunately, translates just fine. As his colleagues wait patiently in line – Tiesj Benoot fidgets as he waits for an opening to bellow his order for a six pack of Nuggies – Lafay rolls forward to the next window, grabs his prize, stabs a spoon through the lid, and confetti rains from the patio overhead. Victor is the Victor.
3.All of the riders, one by one, climbing into the commissaire’s car, across the rear seat and out the other side
There’s only one possible explanation for things having gone as they have so far this season, and that’s someone snoozing on the job. Without impugning the fine folks of race organising committees everywhere and the commissaires that sign off their efforts (OK, impugning them a little) it seems likely that there have been some ‘i’s left undotted, some ‘t’s uncrossed. But there’s a surefire way of ensuring that you have the full attention of those who are refereeing a bicycle race.
It is as follows: A patron of the peloton – an Alexander Kristoff kind of figure, say, someone stern and burly and respectable – drifts back to the lead commissaire’s car, resting his big Norwegian forearm on the passenger-side windowsill. With his other hand he slowly applies his brake, his gravitational pull dragging the Skoda Enyaq to a standstill in the middle of the road. Then with a gruff Nordic bellow – imagine that one bit in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when the Rohirrim canter around in perfect formation to circle Gimli and Legolas and Aragorn – the peloton forms a neat line next to the car. The door is forced open. One by one, 150 sweaty riders sashay their way across the lap of the commissaire in the rear seat: not aggressively, you understand, just politely squeezing by as you might in a crowded train carriage. The winner is the last rider through before the commissaire wakes up from his little nap.
4.Up a ramp onto the roof of team buses
If you’re in a bike-adjacent place in your life, chances are you know about Danny MacAskill. The gifted Scotsman is something of a bicycle ballet dancer, with his elegant and daring pirouettes between train-tracks, around gymnasiums, off ramps onto tiny platforms.
There’s years of training that leads to that level of mastery, though, so I think we cannot expect the professional road bicyclists of the world to progress immediately to the tiny platform. We need a bigger platform, and luckily there are plenty of them available at any given race in the form of enormous team buses.
Teams can marginal-gains their own ramps and approach through the team paddock, opt for lone-wolf bids for glory or a team leadout to launch their guy skywards. Once landing on the roof with a satisfying metallic thunk – startling the soigneurs within – the rider/riders set to work on prying open the skylight, abseiling into the inner sanctum of the bus on a latex tube like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible. First into the shower wins.
5.Up and into an active volcano
There are plenty of ways to blame riders for the calamitous situations that they can find themselves in: riding too fast, riding too carelessly, having too-narrow handlebars or too-big gears or too-long socks. But the world is full of forces greater even than the impenetrability and inconsistency of a UCI handbook, and within that lies scope for race finishes to blur the lines between sport and natural disaster movie.
How better to service the marketing needs of Visit Sicily™ than to route a race up the sides of the active volcano, Mount Etna? Sure, there are probably volcanologists that the UCI and the race organisers it works alongside can call upon, but why not just vibe-check it, morning-of? What more compelling visual spectacle can there be than TV helicopters swerving majestically around shimmering magma, lenses trained on a tense two-up sprint between Alexey Lutsenko and pyroclastic flow into the spluttering heart of the caldera?
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