The UCI, teams, riders and race organisers showed a united front during the latest presentation of the SafeR project, insisting race and rider safety is slowly improving in professional cycling.
The current dangers of racing on European roads were highlighted by footage of a car briefly driving towards the peloton at the Étoile de Bessèges race with 17km to go in stage 2. It sparked a crash, with Maxim Van Gils (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) forced to abandon the race and go to hospital.
In the sprint finish, Marc Brustenga (Equipo Kern Pharma) appeared to suffer an unexpected high-speed tyre blowout.
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SafeR was announced on the eve of the 2023 Tour de France, just days after the tragic death of Gino Mäder at the Tour de Suisse. Early work by Visma-Lease a Bike team manager Richard Plugge and others finally brought together the so-called stakeholders of the sport to try to improve race safety.
SafeR includes representatives from the UCI, the AIOCC race organisers' association, the AIGCP teams' association and the men's and women's Cyclistes Professionnels Associés (CPA) riders' association. Professional cycling is often divided about control of the sport, revenue, business models and key decisions but safety and SafeR appears to have finally brought everyone together.
The riders are being involved more and more thanks to Adam Hansen taking a far more proactive role than his predecessors at the head of the CPA. Hansen admitted that discussions between the stakeholders do occasionally 'get heated' but added, "that's because we're all passionate about it".
"We're all fighting for the best for the sport. We have different angles and points of view but we all want the races and the riders to be safe and crash less," Hansen said.
Major crashes at Dwars door Vlaanderen, Itzulia Basque in the spring of 2024 left WorldTour riders such as Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Wout van Aert seriously injured. Then the tragic death of Muriel Furrer at the Zurich World Championships highlighted the dangers of the sport and a need for everyone to do more.
"Safety is one of the highest of our priorities," said Brent Copeland, the Jayco-Alula team manager and president of the AIGCP, unaware of the Étoile de Bessèges incident.
"Our riders are our asset but cycling is a dangerous sport and so we have to make that environment as safe as possible. It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take a long time, but the right steps are being made to work in that direction."
SafeR has drawn-up 27 so-called 'deliverable', actions and rule changes that they think can improve safety. Matthew Knight, the UCI's sports strategy manager, is temporarily overseeing the SafeR project until a new CEO is found and showed 15 slides to explain their strategy.
It includes the creation of a Race Incident Database with Ghent University, the yellow card system that punishes and deters riders and staff from dangerous actions in races, new rules for sprints and sprint behaviour and a host of plans to look at handlebar and tyre designs, gear restrictions, race route and barrier designs, rider airbags and the use of rider race radios.
The UCI have refused to discuss the responsibilities of Muriel Furrer's death and apparently failure to identify her location but Knight explained that SafeR and the UCI are looking at GPS systems or Race Control centres used in other sports. However, there was a distinct lack of specifics and a timeline, as for a decision on the use of race radios.
The Race Incident Database studied 497 incidents in 2024, with 35% deemed to be caused by rider mistakes. A pie chart showed other causes, with Hansen revealing that 41% are somehow linked to race organisers.
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"You've got 1% for spectators, which is the responsibility of the organizers, traffic infrastructure is 9% points, course design is 13%," Hansen said.
"You can't really include the weather, because that's not really up to the organizer, but that's 11%. Depending how you add it up, 41% of the crashes are towards the race organizer."
The stakeholders are no longer simply blaming each other but appear ready to work together. The weekly Case Management group, that includes former riders Dan Martin and Rubens Bertogliati study each crash in detail to understand why and how it happened.
"It's a really complex system and it's amazing to see how many different views we can get of accidents," Copeland said.
"So the data might say it's the rider's fault but what has caused the rider to make that accident? There might be something that's forced it and at the moment we're not able to determine that.
"But we openly discuss things between ourselves, and that's the most important thing. When Adam said talks get heated up, they do, but that's good, because we open and we're transparent.
"We're the first ones to point fingers at the organisers if we feel that something is not being done right but we have an open dialogue and we look at each other in the face and look at ways of improving things."
