“There is a subject with the equipment but it is not the only one”, estimated David Lappartient, the president of the International Cycling Union (UCI) on Friday, in an interview with AFP after the multiplication of violent falls in the bike. “When we see falls like that, violent, serious, we are naturally worried,” underlined the Frenchman the day after another impressive crash in which Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel in particular suffered multiple fractures.
The UCI president believes that the reasons are “multifactorial”. “The material is obviously a subject,” he admitted. Bicycles have made an extraordinary leap. We break speed records in every race. » Disc brakes are particularly in the crosshairs of riders' unions. “It’s something worth documenting.” The UCI could have conditioned the authorization of disc brakes at the time on the installation of guards (Editor's note: on the brakes). It was not the case. It’s a subject that we want to put back on the table, there is no taboo subject,” he insisted.
The president of the UCI, “shocked” by the fall of Wout Van Aert who “no longer had a jersey” after going to the ground, believes that there is also a “real subject on the nature of combinations” and evokes “protections of a somewhat air bag nature”. David Lappartient, however, felt that we could "not summarize everything around the material alone", evoking in particular "the attitude of the runners" and the faults of certain organizers.
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“A lot has been done. But we still see some things we shouldn't see. At the Basque Country prologue, Primoz Roglic almost crashed into a car in the last kilometer of the prologue, we wonder what she was doing there. » As for the runners themselves, “we see that 50% of falls are due to their attitude”. “I’m not here to say that it’s their fault,” he said. It could be a moment of inattention. But hence also our desire to put in place this year a principle of yellow cards and red cards like in football so that dangerous attitudes are better punished. »
Aware that "the riders' unions are expecting rapid measures", David Lappartient welcomed the fact that the four families of cycling (organizers, riders, teams, UCI) had "agreed together to create SafeR", a body supposed to work for safety runners.