After winning the inaugural Copenhagen Sprint, Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-Protime) criticised the UCI in her post-race interview, contrasting the UCI’s announcement about minimum handlebar width with the lack of signalisation during the race that caused several crashes.
“I’m a bit annoyed that the UCI is doing things differently with the handlebars and stuff and not really thinking about our safety. It was a bit dangerous sometimes, with nobody signalling the central reservations,” said Wiebes.
A central reservation caused one of the big crashes in the race, where a.o. Wiebes’ teammate Blanka Vas went down and had to abandon the race.
The second crash happened at a narrowing in the road designed to slow down motor vehicles while cyclists can continue unhindered around the bollards – unless they are in a big peloton, that is. Both points of danger lacked any kind of signalisation to warn the riders.
Finally, a crash in a right-hand turn on the city centre circuit took down two riders and split the peloton on the final lap.
“Luckily, I was in front of it, I heard it behind me. These kinds of crashes mostly happen in these city centres, but on the bigger lap we also had some crashes, and we lost one of our important teammates, Blanka Vas, there. She was a part of the lead-out, so we needed to adjust a bit. In the end, it worked out all good. But I hope next time the UCI takes a bit more care of our safety,” Wiebes said.
Earlier this week, the UCI announced that it would enforce a minimum handlebar width of 40 centimetres in mass-start road and cyclo-cross races from the 2026 season onwards, citing safety implications as the reason behind the decision, as some riders have opted for increasingly narrow handlebars in recent years.
However, a rigidly fixed minimum handlebar width doesn’t take into account riders’ difference in size.
Many women’s pro cyclists said that their handlebars are below the to-be-introduced 40-centimetre limit simply because they have narrow shoulders, and Karl Lima, Coop-Repsol team manager, posted on Social Media that all 13 of his riders use handlebars narrower than 40 cm.
