Road Cycling Safety: An Endless Debate Without Real Change
I continue to insist on the issue of road cycling safety, a debate that has been ongoing for years but, unfortunately, never seems to bring real change. At the Volta ao Algarve, we once again witnessed a huge safety failure. This time, it nearly ended in tragedy. And not just for the riders, but also for the spectators.
In the footage, you can clearly see a woman with a stroller realizing at the very last second that the peloton is approaching at full speed and rushing back onto the sidewalk to avoid disaster. Now, imagine if a child had crossed the street right in front of 150 riders going 60 km/h — on a road that wasn’t even part of the official course.
How is it possible that such situations still happen in 2025? Probably because, at this point, professional cycling safety has become just a topic for conferences and press releases, without any real substance behind it. Yet the solutions to improve safety are many. The first one — which I’ve been advocating for years — is having a course inspection team made up of former riders, appointed directly by the UCI. But if course inspections continue to be handled by organizers and teams — parties who are anything but impartial — nothing will ever truly change.
The deviation for the team cars at the roundabout was a predictable and easily avoidable mistake. It would have been enough to apply the standard protocol: clearly separating the race and the team cars before the roundabout, keeping the peloton to the left. Instead, this time, they placed the deviation after the roundabout. The resulting confusion had extremely serious consequences.
Beyond the organizational issues, however, this episode also highlighted another major problem: riders’ excessive dependence on race radios. Matteo Trentin recently said in an interview that those against radios “don’t understand cycling.” I actually believe the opposite: precisely because I understand cycling, I have always been against radios.
Why? Because radios suppress a rider’s instinct — the ability to read the race. A rider thinking for himself knows when to attack, when to save energy, when to take risks. With a voice constantly in your ear, you can be slowed down, second-guessed, or stopped by the team car. How many attacks have never even started because a directeur sportif said no over the radio?
There’s also another less discussed but important factor: balance. The ear is the organ that controls balance, and blocking one ear with a radio doesn’t help — especially when descending. As a rider who loved to attack downhill, I know how uncomfortable it felt to have compromised hearing while taking risks through tight corners.
At the Volta ao Algarve — a race that usually handles a massive crowd with great organization — we saw the effects of this dependency. The riders were so used to being guided by radios that they didn’t even realize they had gone off course. They ignored the lead riders who had slowed down and tried to signal the mistake. They dodged an ambulance with 300 meters to go without questioning why it was there. They sprinted without a banner, without barriers, and without realizing another race was happening right next to them. They kept sprinting… into nothingness.
That’s why I was truly sorry to see the race results annulled. Filippo Ganna had read the situation perfectly. He observed, understood, and made the right decision. That should have been his victory. According to the rules, it’s the rider’s responsibility to follow the correct course. If a rider makes a mistake by following a lead vehicle or wrong signage, it’s considered his fault. Here, Ganna did everything correctly — and yet he was stripped of the win?
To me, that jury decision just threw more mud on an already disastrous day.
