The Cyclists' Alliance (TCA) has urged the UCI to revise its race safety protocols after the CIC-Tour des Pyrénées was cancelled last weekend in the midst of a storm of criticism over what the union described as “a high level of danger and disregard for rider safety" in the race.
TCA have argued in a statement published this week that the “race was unsafe from day one” and that live TV coverage “provided ample evidence of the disregard for rider safety.”
The Tour des Pyrénées was finally cancelled on June 11, shortly before stage 3 was due to start.
While the race organiser subsequently strongly criticised the riders’ collective decision to stop racing, the TCA claimed that “the procedure for evaluating the safety of the race was not clear” and says that the organiser’s “responses to teams’ concerns during the race appeared, at times, dismissive and disingenuous.”
In addition, when it came to the UCI and federation checks in place prior to races, the TCA said it believed the UCI and national federations should “improve the rigour applied in the event approval process." That way it could ensure organisers’ plans would “comply with the expectations for safety set out by the UCI regulations.”
The TCA also argued the UCI’s protocol during races for assessing safety and extreme weather issues needed greater clarification.
When a meeting with the organisers and Commissaires’ President as well as rider and team reps was called to decide if a race should continue or not, the TCA claimed the protocol was overly vague about the process riders and teams should use to accurately represent their respective groups’ points of view.
The protocol was also unclear about how much weight those respective points of view had in the final decision-making process, the TCA said.
Last but not least, the TCA also argued that when it came to the six possible actions that can be decided according to the extreme weather/rider safety protocol, the current state of affairs, whereby the protocol gives ultimate decision-making power to the race organiser and the president of the commissaires’ panel, needed changing.
“This process for corrective action and decision-making fails to acknowledge the vested interest of the organiser in maintaining the status quo i.e. continuing the race and not spending money to make the race safer for riders,” the TCA argued.
The TCA press release concludes by urging the UCI to revise these parts of the protocol, with a view to ensuring “greater independence, free from conflicts of interest, when difficult decisions around rider safety need to be made.”
