June 1950. The French national championships is coming to a climax at the autodrome at Montlhéry, a banked concrete oval 30km outside Paris. Camille Danguillaume, winner of the 1949 Liège–Bastogne–Liège, is part of a three-man breakaway going into the final circuit, hoping to climb one step higher on the podium after the disappointment of his second-place finish the year before.
He never made it to the finish line. Three days later, Danguillaume was dead, killed by the skull fracture he sustained after being hit by one of the motorbikes following the race. René Chesal, the general secretary of the UCI, was moved to write: “An accident, a twist of fate, but also the result of a state of affairs that has been accepted for too long: the cavalcade of bikers, reckless drivers, truckers that surround any race.”
March 2016. A 25-year-old Belgian rider goes to the start line of the Gent-Wevelgem, his second ever World Tour appearance. He’s buzzing after the success of his ride at E3 Harelbeke, where he worked his way into the main breakaway in his first World Tour appearance. Maybe he’ll do the same again today.
He never made it to the finish line. Antoine Demoitié crashed and was then hit by a commissaire’s motorbike. He died several hours later. The UCI responded with a brief three-line statement. The safety of riders during UCI-sanctioned races is not discussed.
Demoitié died 66 years after Danguillaume. That’s 66 years in which the size of the cavalcade has bloated from the 40 or so vehicles that Henri Degrange would “almost certainly” remove from the Tour de France in 1921 to the hundreds of vehicles – the motorbikes, vans, cars and buses – that surround a modern bike race. On that fatal day at the Gent-Wevelgem, there were 59 motorbikes alone, 24 of them providing race security. An image of Vyacheslav Kuznetsov surrounded by motorbikes shot round social media. Somewhere inside that ring of steel and heavily padded leather there was a flesh and blood cyclist with only a helmet for protection.
You could forgive a Belgian race for being sensitive to security concerns in the wake of the Brussels bombings five days earlier. It was touch and go whether the raft of scheduled races would go ahead at all. But the proliferation of motorbikes and support cars makes a modern bike race look more like the average bicycle commute in the hostile hurly burly of the rush hour than a professional sport.
There is a synergy between motorised and man-powered vehicles in any cycling race. Arguably the professional sport would not exist without the advertising revenues the publicity caravan brings. Support vehicles have saved the day for many a rider with a mechanical issue or the hunger knock. The rapid response of the race doctor or ambulance has saved lives. The coverage we enjoy from our sofa, the images we celebrate, are brought to us courtesy of the photographers and their pilots who are always searching for the perfect shot. And the impact of the bicycle on motorised transport can’t be overstated; both Henry Ford and the Wright Brothers started their careers as bicycle mechanics. There is a mutual respect between four wheels and two.
But the mutual respect that holds the various elements of a bike race in balance is beginning to rupture as the sport expands. Those new to cycling trample on more experienced toes. Everyone wants the money shot. Elbows and tongues sharpen. As in any modern workplace pressure, stress and boredom take their toll in fatigue and lack of concentration. Relationships are stress tested – and fracture.
July 2011. A five-man breakaway is heading towards the finish line in Saint-Flour. It’s stage nine of the Tour de France and the spoils are up for grabs – a stage win, the polka dot jersey, maybe even the Maillot Jaune itself. A France 2 media car draws alongside the group, veers briefly on to the grass verge, swerves to avoid a tree stump and ploughs sidelong into Juan Antonio Flecha. The Spaniard’s bike slides into Johnny Hoogerland’s and the Belgian is thrown through the air like a toy tossed from a pram, his involuntary flight cut short by the spikes of a barbed wire fence. Shorts and skin-shredded, he somehow makes it to the finish line and into the polka dot jersey. He waits three years for compensation – for the psychological impact, the physical injury, the loss of a stage win and with it those job offers and fat contracts. The driver responsible returns to the Tour de France the following year.
April, 2015. Tour of Flanders, one of the great cobbled Classics. Jesse Sergent is in a group of riders when a Shimano neutral service car drives up alongside, impatient to pass. He clips the New Zealander, knocking him off his bike and into the path of his fellow riders, breaking his collarbone in the process and putting him out of action for several weeks. Less than an hour later, Sébastien Chavanel crashes heavily when another Shimano vehicle rear ends his team car. Chavanel is forced to retire, his race over. Shimano neutral cars have been back in service on the Belgian circuit this spring.
July, 2015. The peloton are swooping down the Col du Glandon. The descent is fast and narrow, demanding maximum concentration. When Jakob Fuglsang slides off his bike it seems as if his attention has wandered for just a second – until footage reveals a photographer’s motorbike narrowly avoiding taking down Ryder Hesjedal before clipping the Danish rider.
August, 2015. A furious Peter Sagan trails in over 5’ down on the peloton during stage eight of the Vuelta a España after being hit by a Shimano motorbike. His Tinkoff-Saxo team threaten to sue race organisers, saying: “Such accidents caused by reckless human error are unacceptable at the top level of the sport of cycling.” The pilot is excluded from the race and Sagan is fined 200 Swiss Francs (£146) for making “threats and insults”. The rider pays up, saying: “Motorbike drivers don’t take the safety of the riders in consideration seriously. Fortunately, my injuries aren’t very serious but can you imagine what would have happened if he had run over me?”
February, 2016. Stig Broeckx moves out from the pack to the right hand side of the road during Kuurne–Brussels–Kuurne. The medical motorbike speeding up the road behind him reacts too late. Impact is inevitable. In swerving to avoid the rider, the motorbike sends him skittling to the tarmac.
Antoine Demoitié’s death was an accident waiting to happen.
“Someone please step forward,” asked BMC team manager Jim Ochowicz of the UCI in 2015. Accusing the UCI’s safety committee of a lack of action, he wrote: “Safety problems at races continue to accelerate and are now a nearly everyday issue.”
Ochowicz’s team had been at the thick end of the growing spate of serious safety incidents with Greg Van Avermaet taken down by a motorbike in the last kilometre of the San Sebastián Classic and Taylor Phinney forced into the crash barriers by an errant motorbike at the US National Championships. Phinney suffered a severe leg fracture that almost ended his career.
Ochowicz proposed a series of safety measures, including better course design, a reduction in the size of the peloton and the flotilla of vehicles surrounding it and a more rigorous training process for drivers. The current UCI accreditation – the UCI driver’s certificate – is valid for four years and is, by all accounts, a tick-boxing exercise delivered in a single morning. It said to be heavy on Powerpoint with no practical element.
Ochowicz repeated his call for action from the UCI in February this year. “No rider expects to be run down from behind by an over-enthusiastic pilot on a closed race course,” said the BMC manager. “This has got to stop before the headlines in the future are of a more disturbing nature than what we have seen in 2015 and now again in 2016. To the UCI, I am turning to you for answers and solutions.”
A month later, Demoitié was dead.
As far back as April 2015, the UCI issued a statement iterating that “safety should at all times be the number one priority of all those involved in a cycling race,” promising comprehensive reports and “potential action”.
It’s not as if the UCI aren’t concerned about rider safety. The new “Bike City” mark will reward cities that promote participation, cycling infrastructure and safety for cyclists. There is recognition that safety concerns are the biggest barrier to UCI ambitions to promote a worldwide cycling culture. And through support of the Amy Gillett Foundation and its A Metre Matters campaign – urging legislation to make room for cyclists – the UCI are demonstrating their awareness that cycling safety matters.
But when the focus switches to the sport of professional road cycling, the UCI sings a different tune. In the extensive list of rules and regulations covering the organisation of the sport, safety is mentioned a total of 18 times. Most tellingly, they state: “The organiser alone shall be answerable for the quality and safety of the organisation and installations.” Should a race organiser wish to limit the number of vehicles in the press motorcade as a result of safety concerns, they may only do so with the express permission of the UCI.
It’s a key dilemma for the sport. High-quality media and TV coverage is crucial if cycling is to capitalise on and grow its new found popularity. Dimension Data have partnered with ASO to “deliver and share the best race information speedily and in real-time” whilst Velon, the association of 11 World Tour teams, is planning a 2016 roll out of live telemetry to provide heart rate, power and cadence data. If, as is promised, these innovations enrich and fundamentally change our experience of watching live cycling will the cavalcade of photographers on motorbikes still be necessary?
And as spectators are we also complicit? Is there a genuine craving for images of riders in distress, at the end of their force, lying sprawled in a ditch, curled bleeding on the tarmac? Cycling has a long standing narrative of heroism and courage, bravado and panache, suffering and endurance – the Giants and the convicts of the road. When Hoogerland crossed the line, blood oozing through his bandages we raised our collective chapeaux and bought the T-shirt. For us his suffering was another exploit and Hoogerland another hard man legend of the sport. For the rider it was the start of a long period of physical and mental rehabilitation. The scars on his calves still bother him.
In the 66 years between the deaths of Danguillaume and Demoitié the complexion of professional road cycling has changed out of all recognition. Races are faster, machines ever lighter, training methods ever more scientific. And the roads are changing too – the proliferation of road furniture and the search for untested and “authentic” routes has driven races to seek out ever more testing, potentially dangerous parcours.
The routes of the great Classics and the mightiest climbs have remained unchanged for over a century and cart tracks are forced to accommodate the full heft of the modern peloton. As Marcel Kittel, the German sprinter, pointed out: “There is a difference between riders crashing in the last hectic kilometres of a race, fighting for the right wheel before the sprint and riders crashing because of unsafe road furniture, reckless driving of motorbikes or cars, extreme weather conditions and unsafe race routes.”
Kittel doesn’t shy away from the danger and adrenalin of the sprint, citing new technologies such as electronic shifters and disc brakes as elements in the calculated risk taking of every professional. Then there’s the tight line or squeezing a hurtling bike through an ever narrowing gap. “The rush of speed and the victory as reward afterwards are one of the components that make our sport so interesting,” he writes. But he recognises that those calculated risks – and their consequences – fall to him alone. What disturbs Kittel, and the many other professional riders who have been moved to comment on Demoitie’s death, is the inexorable rise of the reckless moto and their vulnerability on the roads.
Kittel’s comments have been met with praise by a cycling community shocked, saddened and angered not only by Demoitie’s untimely death but by the lack of leadership shown by the UCI. But here’s the kicker. Rule 1.2.063: “In no case can the UCI be held responsible for defects in the course or installations or for any accidents that may occur.” It’s the UCI’s get-out-of-jail-free card. Despite regulating the weight of bikes, the size of the peloton, the conduct of drivers in the motorcade and a myriad of other details, the sport’s regulating body claims plausible deniability for the safety of the professional peloton.
There is anger at the UCI’s handling of the safety crisis facing cycling. Responsibility for the safety, health and wellbeing of professional riders should be at the core of what the UCI stands for. That the governing body acknowledges its responsibility towards rider safety except in the professional sport deserves scorn and ridicule. When a platinum-quiffed rider can effortlessly strike a more genuinely presidential note than the UCI’s elected leader then something is badly amiss.
Like the Queen being forced to comment in the wake of Princess Diana’s death, Brian Cookson finally issued his proclamation. There will be new protocols and regulations, operational guides and sanctions. The sport has been waiting for them since 2015, when it was promised a response after the off season. “Complex problems require complex solutions,” says Cookson. And he is right when he talks of the sport’s stakeholders assuming their individual responsibilities towards this complex problem.
Yet, for many observers and commenters the solution seems remarkably simple: the immediate implementation of maximum speed and minimum passing distance guidelines. In the Netherlands, the signallers who close the roads do not ride through the peloton but make their way past the peloton via the side roads. It’s a small gesture but it has a huge impact. It’s a question of simple respect. If a metre matters for cycling commuters, then it matters for the professional peloton.
But the furious and dismayed tweets, impassioned opinion pieces and UCI press releases mean nothing to Demoitié now. He is simply the young man with the broad and open smile who woke up one spring morning and rode out full of hope to meet his death on the cobbles.
• This article is from 100 Tours 100 Tales
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