Bike racing, safety, and ‘the spectacle’

I got into it with quite a few people yesterday about Muriel Furrer’s crash.  While I accept the RIP thread probably wasn’t the place to have a big argument, I think it’s a subject that needs getting into.

‘Response Time is Critical’: CPA President Adam Hansen Says Major Changes Needed after Recent Deaths

Gino Mäder, Andre Drege, and now Muriel Furrer have all died in a little more than a year.  As I said on the other thread, the manner of Muriel’s death has particularly upset me.

Well, in the three recent deaths, they all have one thing in common: no one from the race organization or the commissaires noticed them.

I feel every sport these days is obsessed with growth, ie, growing it’s audience.  Not increasing participation, but increasing the number of people watching it.  This means that the focus is always on increasing the drama and the spectacle (no doubt with half an eye on how it’s going to play out on the next Netflix series).

No competitor in any sport can never be held responsible for their own safety.  A competitor’s job is to do everything in their power to win.  They have to push every rule to the limit and common sense simply cannot come into it.  Competitor safety begins and ends with the governing body.  Riders are going to push the rules and so the rules have to be enforced in such a way that the risk reward ratio of breaking safety rules means that breaking the rules simply isn’t worth it.

I like watching bike racing and I like watching the Netflix series but I really don’t want to encourage the UCI to continue sacrificing rider safety on the alter of growth.

If anything is to come from Mureil’s death I really hope it’s that it’s the final straw that causes sweeping changes in the way races are run.

This reminds me a bit of Henri Toivonen, the rally driver who died in 1986. He crashed, but nobody witnessed it. Back then, it was impossible to monitor all the contestants in real time. With the technology we have now, it would be simple to track each contestant and know if they had crashed within seconds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Toivonen#Death

With the technology we have now, it would be simple to track each contestant and know if they had crashed within seconds.

Completely agree. Consumer bike computers already have crash detection. GPS can report your exact location. The technology might not exist in exactly the package organisers are looking for, but it exists and I imagine could be introduced relatively quickly at world tour level and world champs.

The wider question of general safety is a bit more complicated. For the most part they’re racing on the same roads they have for 100 years, and with far superior equipment. If there are an increase in crashes I feel that mostly comes down to the way they’re being raced, and this seems to be backed up by the number of World tour riders reporting that there’s no longer any let up in races, with them going full gas from start to finish. I think that’s part of the progression of the sport and something organisers have little control over.

There are various things to make sections safer, like more signage and crash mats, but nothing is going to take away from the fact that racing bikes on open roads at 60mph is dangerous. You can take it to a completely sanitised environment like a velodrome and still get some serious incidents. Much is down to the level of acceptable risk chosen by the riders (and I’m sure pushed on them by their sponsors) and I’m really not sure how that can be changed. It’s not like you can tell them to slow down. All the organisers can do is identify dangerous sections and take appropriate measures to minimise the risk of injury.

There are various things to make sections safer, like more signage and crash mats, but nothing is going to take away from the fact that racing bikes on open roads at 60mph is dangerous. You can take it to a completely sanitised environment like a velodrome and still get some serious incidents. Much is down to the level of acceptable risk chosen by the riders (and I’m sure pushed on them by their sponsors) and I’m really not sure how that can be changed. It’s not like you can tell them to slow down.

I think is the key factor. I’m not up on all the facts of the recent fatal crashes, but I’ve not heard too many protests in the cycling press about the courses being the issue? In which case rider error – either the victim or someone else in the group – presumably misjudged a line and/or their speed resulting in the crash. (Appreciate that sounds like victim blaming, which was not my intention).

We haven’t got the full facts from the latest tragedy, but given that all pros ride with some sort of GPS/tracker, crash detection should be activated either to the team or organiser. How far down the competitive layers that should be enforced I’m not sure, but I guess most racers also have a device on board.

And while all deaths and serious injuries are tragic, be interesting to compare cycling with other pro sports to see which ones have better/worse accident rates and see what lessons can be learned. Concussion protocols being an example.

This reminds me a bit of Henri Toivonen, the rally driver who died in 1986.

I thought about the parallels with motorsport but I think there are some key differences.

For one thing, in motorsport the entire game is driving a car fast.  In cycling, being able to descend fast (and in control) is a fairly tiny part of it.  You can probably get pretty far in professional cycling and still not super-competent on the downhills.

The other point is that the danger in motorsport is shared equally between those at the front and those at the back.  While that’s true partly in cycling, the odds of someone mid-pack crashing and no one noticing is much much higher than Pogacar, Vingegaard, van Aert, or van der Poel crashing and no one noticing. Also, if Pogacar had been injured and alone for half an hour I suspect the reaction would have have been far stronger than Mader, Grege, and Furrer combined.

I was shocked when it emerged how long it took to realise Muriel Furrer had crashed.  To then hear Adam Hansen saying that in all three fatal crashes in the last eighteen months the officials had not been aware the crashes happened is beyond belief.

To me, it’s irrelevant if the officials being aware of the crashes would have changed the outcomes.  The fact that riders crashing and being severely injured but no one knowing about it is unacceptable in and of itself.  To me technology should be a back up to humans monitoring positions as Hansen describes in the article.

Between technology and humans with clipboards a rider crashing and no one knowing should be a freak occurrence.  Not something that seems to be happening regularly throughout the season.

Interesting reading that Adam Hansen interview in Velo – he’s proposing some sort of sensor which attaches to a riders skull (rather than the helmet) to measure impact (mainly to trigger concussion protocols).

I don’t think there is a golden bullet to deal with rider safety. Safety netting and/or padding is a very specific fix for a very specific problem in a very specific place (which is fine for short course events like DH racing) but its a game of whack-a-mole as there are SO many potential other risks.

Incident detection tech on Garmins is shite currently – I switch mine off because of so many false alarms but unless the units themselves have built in satellite comms, then there’s too many places (eg down a gorge alongside an alpine descent) where there just won’t be an Internet connection

(As a side note, I know ASO have to fly a plane above the TdF to relay TV signals as there’s insufficient reliable connectivity. I guess other large races may do the same. Maybe such connectivity could be leveraged for tracking riders but that’s not gonna work for smaller events without such coverage.)

There’s also the question of rider safety when they are training. Presumably the teams have an employer:employee relationship which includes an element of duty of care but there’s been some serious accidents out of competition.

Then, of course, there’s also rider idiocy (Chris Froome trying to put on a jacket during cross winds between buildings….)

I like watching bike racing and I like watching the Netflix series but I really don’t want to encourage the UCI to continue sacrificing rider safety on the alter of growth.

This is what bugged me yesterday – it turned into a “the big bad UCI need to have all the top boys lose their jobs!” rant and I admit I got riled by that and I’m sorry for the one dig I had at you with that.

The UCI (much as everyone loves to slag them off for supposedly concentrating on sock length rather than safety, which is a another very unfair comment) have taken huge steps recently.

https://www.uci.org/pressrelease/the-uci-introduces-new-measures-to-promote-safety-at-road-races/2yeZpcND1F42EPkuML6VWo Then there’s stuff like the Severe Weather Protocol, better anti-doping, heavily revised sprint finish layouts, the extension of the old 1km to go rule to a 3km to go rule (and which is currently being tested for even further extension)

The two biggest risks in pro cycling (other than the riders crashing into each other) are spectators and the convoy vehicles.

Spectators are a nightmare – thankfully there’s almost none of the “football hooligan” element to cycle race spectators but they’re often pissed, wildly excited, waving flags, setting off flares, or holding up stupid signs :

That’s before you get onto the dogs, kids, old folk trying to cross the road and folk holding out selfie sticks (another thing which has been responsible for any number of crashes). The UCI have cracked down on this considerably – a lot of sprint finishes now have “dead zones”, a double line of barriers to prevent spectators leaning over and there was one climb in the Tour recently where they banned spectators outrigtht cos they knew they’d never achieve any sort of control over that location. There have also been high-profile posts on social media to track down miscreants and issue fines (although I think that Opi woman got away with a symbolic 1 euro fine).

The second big issue (and the third main cause of crashes after rider-on-rider and rider-spectator) is team vehicles. Frankly I think it’s insane that the driver of the vehicle is still allowed to hand up food and drink and clothing while controlling the vehicle, sometimes while the rider hangs on, sometimes while the rider is slipstreaming it. That remains one of the most bonkers things although being fair to the UCI, there is now a Driver Course (which I’ve done) and at each event, there is a mandatory Driver Briefing, with a presentation (including videos, diagrams etc) of expected driver behaviours, do’s and don’t’s. They take it very seriously and I know the police on Tour of Britain prosecuted at least one driver for mobile phone use. Team Managers driving the vehicles though are much like the riders. They’ll push every rule to the limit in a quest to support their riders and sometimes the riders don’t help themselves – it’s not uncommon to see a rider raise their hand calling for the team car but to do this on the narrowest, twistiest bit of singletrack road on the entire route. The rider gets increasingly irate, the team car can’t get through and is trying to drive through bushes and verges to get up there, all this is happening at 25-40mph…. But the next main consideration at any major race is assessing the drivers for their qualification, competence and experience. I know that a driver at the Glasgow Worlds was “asked to leave” the event midway through.

Remember this?

The driving on cycle races has long been one of the biggest rider safety issues which is why I was slightly scathing that your supposed “first question” would be “what happens is a rider crashes and no-one sees?” I admit that it could / should be A Question but not that it should be The First Question. Splitting hairs a bit maybe but risk is about looking at the likelihood and the outcome and creating a matrix and then focusing on the big red squares where Highly Likely and Highly Consequential combine.

This is turning into a long post but depending on how the thread pans out, I may pop back with an example of what happens in a crash situation.

Consumer bike computers already have crash detection

It might be viable for road riding but it’s useless as far as mountain biking goes if my Garmin is representative. I had to turn it off as it had far too many false positives.

I doubt if there’s presently a viable technological solution for tracking competitors and accounting for “missing” riders. Ensuring reliable tracking coverage must be an issue, and there are numerous reasons why multiple riders could be simultaneously reporting genuine stops during an event (plus false alarms). How do you reliably interpret all that information during a race and identify what is a priority? It might just make things worse by generating excessive noise that diverts attention from something important.

More marshalls on potential hazard points might be the simplest and most effective way to increase safety in the short term. I think we need to wait for the results of the investigation to see if there is anything specific to be learned from the recent tragedy.

Seems to me that GPS reporting and/or crash detection would be a really simple and effective solution to the specific issue of riders crashing unseen and not being found (or even missed) for a lengthy period of time. Hard to imagine it won’t be rapidly introduced voluntarily by the teams if not through a UCI-enforced code or rule.

As said gps has been around for ages so the team would know they had stopped and if they had gone any distance of the road.  Presumably they would also see the rapid deceleration associated with a crash. They all have live telemetry to the riders bike computers. If they can tell me what bruini’s heart rate is mid race run this shouldn’t be hard

There are things like Specialized offer on helmets that claims to work for crash detection both on and off road. Never used one do don’t know if they are any good

Seems to me that GPS reporting and/or crash detection would be a really simple and effective solution to the specific issue of riders crashing unseen and not being found (or even missed) for a lengthy period of time. Hard to imagine it won’t be rapidly introduced voluntarily by the teams if not through a UCI-enforced code or rule.

It’d be a very significant rule change because, as things stand, the TRANSMISSION of data from a rider to “others” (including the team car) is banned. You can talk by radio, that’s fine. However the team car cannot access anything from the rider’s head unit or any metrics around HR, body temperature etc. The head unit can show all sorts of stuff around power, HR, gradients, the route, distance/speed etc but that info is only visible to the rider, there is no transmission of it permitted to anyone else.

There’s a further rule that body-worn sensors for things like blood sugar, lactate etc are also banned. The 3rd placed finisher in the Women’s Strada Bianche got DQ’d a couple of years ago for exactly that.

The only transmission permitted is from on-bike cameras which are controlled by the organisation, not the teams. There’s a whole raft of legislation around the use of those, who gets to have them, tampering with them and so on; the cameras (and the footage) belong to the organisation, not the riders or teams.

Teams know where the riders are from a mix of factors. TV and race radio will show and call the composition of the breakaway and any chase groups along with time gaps. So take Team A with riders #1-7.

The race starts and everyone is in the peloton. Everyone knows that. Soon there’s a breakaway and race radio says that (of Team A), #6 is in the break at 2 mins up the road. The position is known from a following moto with a GPS / radio antenna and a Commissaire broadcasting over race radio the numbers of the riders so that every team is informed at the same time the composition of the break.

Meanwhile, #3 gets dropped and drifts back through the following team cars, the number noted by the Commissaire behind the peloton. The team car isn’t going to stay there – they might hand some water and food up as the rider drops back through the cars but there’s a race on up front, the team car needs to be there for when the remaining riders need them. So now the DS in the car needs a mental picture that 2′ up the road is #6, in the peloton is 1, 2, 4, 5, & 7 and out the back “somewhere” is #3. #3 will still be within the race bubble; there’ll be other cars, media, motos, marshals and the broom wagon around and behind them so they’re not really “lost” as such but they sort of cease to matter much. Chances are they’ll join up with other dropped riders and just roll it into the finish inside the time cut.

The Worlds is a bit different, it’s a number of circuits to complete rather than (as in the Tour) a linear route from one place to another so riders will just be pulled out, they’ll be withdrawn as they pass the team tents / feed zone. In theory at least, no rider or group of riders should ever be left alone to get to that location – there should (as I say “in theory”) be at the very least a couple of motos with each group on the road.

But the problem with tracking individual riders via GPS is that it creates a hell of a lot of noise and it could (depending on who can view that info) affect the outcome of the race if a rider is made aware that their main rival is out the back or a vital team member is off having a natural break. That’s the main reason why open-source rider tracking (as with dotwatching for example) is not a thing in road racing.

I’m not saying that’s right or wrong by the way, simply pointing out the rules as they stand at the moment.

For one thing, in motorsport the entire game is driving a car fast. In cycling, being able to descend fast (and in control) is a fairly tiny part of it. You can probably get pretty far in professional cycling and still not super-competent on the downhills.

Bruce, I agree with a lot of your points but just want to pick it apart slightly because I think it feeds into the broader picture.

With the advances in the sport in recent years there’s been a huge increase in average speeds on all terrains. It’s not unusual to see 100+ km/h show up on the speed tracker on screen on descents. I think historically a rider could get away with just being OK at descending but I doubt that’s true in the modern peloton. I’ve definitely heard a few recently retired pros saying it was a factor in their decision ot retire.

This leads into my broader concern about safety in bike racing. With the increased speeds I don’t know if we’ve seen an increase in the frequency of crashes, but I do get the sense that the severity of the crashes is much higher. This makes sense to me as more speed means more kinetic energy to dissipate in a crash, more of which ends up going into a riders body. It feels like from a safety perspective that is somethign that should be looked at, but as to how it could be mitigated I have no idea. It’s a complex problem to solve for sure.

I think historically a rider could get away with just being OK at descending but I doubt that’s true in the modern peloton

I think you’re probably right about that, but in the Zwift era with so many metrics that teams can gather data on when deciding who to sign, I wonder how much attention is paid to a riders potential to be able to descend alpine passes at 100+km/hr.

Without a doubt this skill has become a must have but at the same time I wonder if a team would really say no to someone with good power numbers but who looked a bit sketchy on high speed descents.  Also, some people can be super confident in the dry but turn to quivering wrecks in the wet (or maybe that’s just me, actually I’m not even confident when it’s dry).

Also, the other thing to remember about the new generation of super-descenders is that most of the focus is on the guys at the front.  We don’t see the people further back and just how confident they really are on descents.

The desending skills of the top guys are without question, but I’m not sure we can say for sure that extends all the way through the pro-peleton.

The fact that riders crashing and being severely injured but no one knowing about it is unacceptable in and of itself.

That’s certainly not the case for Gino Mader, or Andre Drege and not what Adam Hansen said in his interview either. He had said that in both cases, it had not been a race organiser that found them, not that they weren’t found at all. (Mader crashed alongside Magnus Sheffield an American rider) and that he, Mader had landed unconscious in water and was immediately resuscitated on the scene.  In the case of  Drege a fellow racer was the sole witness to the crash. I don’t know that in the case of Mader that getting to him even faster than the doctor did already would’ve made any difference. I don’t know that beyond dying during a cycle race that these two crashes have anything else in common with Furrer as they were both as the result of crashes at high speed while descending a mountain..

I don’t know what you do to stop riders descending at the speeds they are capable of now? Impose a speed limit? Stop all mountain stages at the top?

I remember hearing one of the commentators saying that if you want to know what it’s like to crash on an alpine descent in a road race, drive down the motorway at 60mph in your speedos then  open the door and jump out..and that’s not even factoring in the potential to plummet over a cliff once you’ve hit the ground

The speeds they descend at are frankly mind blowing. Some guys may be better at it than others (they are all super competent relative to anyone on this forum) , but I suspect the level of competence comes second to the willingness to take risks when it comes to how dangerous it is. Tom pidcock has had some very close calls in his time. It only needs to go wrong once..

I’m staggered there aren’t more deaths tbh. But as above, how do you remove that element of the race?

But as above, how do you remove that element of the race?

I don’t know but if they don’t at least try then I think continuing attempts to ‘grow’ the sport are immoral.

I think being able to find people immediately after a crash (or at least be aware and start looking for them within a few minutes if they go missing) is a big thing.  Probably with a combination of better administration and technology.

From the link not finding riders seems to be a thing, even if it’s not a direct contributing factor with Mader and Drege, it sounds like it happens but until Muriel Furrer they were getting away with it.

Well, in the three recent deaths, they all have one thing in common: no one from the race organization or the commissaires noticed them. In the Tour of Switzerland, a directeur sportif (DS) found one rider simply because he drove past. The response time was fairly quick in that situation. In the Tour of Austria, another rider was found about 25 minutes after the broom wagon passed. Two ladies riding up after the race saw him, which means he was found about 25 to 45 minutes after his crash. Again, neither the organizer nor the commissaires noticed he was no longer in the race. In Zürich, it’s even worse, from what I understand. The race had already finished before they realized she was missing.

Also, the UCI have no problems dictating the rules for how bikes should be designed.  Perhaps they should be looking at the geometry rules and tyre rules.  If they are going to include stages where people are going to be hitting 80-100km/hr then I don’t see anything wrong with forcing teams to use bikes that are optimised for it, even if that means the bikes aren’t optimised for the rest of the riding.

I think something should be done.  2-3 riders a year is too many.  And if there’s genuinely nothing can be done then it’s time to start looking at banning it.

I very much doubt there is genuinely nothing that can be done.  However, it might affect how spectacular the sport is and therefore not get as many eyeballs.  Something that some might find unacceptable.

Something that some might find unacceptable.

Including, I’d imagine, some the riders themselves.

Also, the UCI have no problems dictating the rules for how bikes should be designed.  Perhaps they should be looking at the geometry rules and tyre rules.  If they are going to include stages where people are going to be hitting 80-100km/hr then I don’t see anything wrong with forcing teams to use bikes that are optimised for it, even if that means the bikes aren’t optimised for the rest of the riding.

They kind of are, the basic shape of the bike is dictated by the UCI to look like it did 100 year ago, and those bikes looked like they did because it’s probably the best solution for bike handling.  And they’ve banned the unnatural positions riders were taking to try and make that shape of bike faster (i.e. they now have to hold the bars and sit on the saddle).

If you wanted to go fast downhill it’s be on some sort of recumbent / prone bike.

Most crashes are in the corners where riders are slowed down (sometimes enough, hence the crash), if you mandated slack angles and wide sticky tyres they’d still corner on the limit, they’d just be going twice as fast.  Someone said up there that crashing on the road is like jumping out of a car on the motorway, which is true if they crashed on a straight, but they don’t,  most crashes are in the corners at <30kmh.  No one (other than people riding motorbikes in t-shirts)  needs to see the results of actually hitting the tarmac at 60mph without protective clothing.

Including, I’d imagine, some the riders themselves.

Yep, but then the entirety of professional cycling isn’t about being able to ride downhills as fast as humanly possible.  If that’s the only reason they are racing then maybe they’d be happier doing something else.

They kind of are, the basic shape of the bike is dictated by the UCI to look like it did 100 year ago, and those bikes looked like they did because it’s probably the best solution for bike handling.

I suspect bikes were optimised for what they do 99% of the time, not their handling at 100km/hr.  I’m a lot more confident on my girlfriends shopping bike going downhill than I am on my road bike but I doubt I’m going much faster.

Downhills have become more important in terms of being able to launch attacks but they are still a tiny part of what the riders do in a bike race.  The bikes are still designed for climbing and riding on the flat.

This list of all cycling deaths might shed some light on the discussion. It’s interesting to note that quite a few of the deaths recorded are as a result of Sudden Cardiac Death 

 I don’t see anything wrong with forcing teams to use bikes that are optimised for it, even if that means the bikes aren’t optimised for the rest of the riding.

So they would just descend faster, feel like they can take more risk and when they do fall off the consequences will be greater. All the recent bike tech is already causing greater speeds which contributes to the issue

You can’t place a limit on the speed they can go (well you could but that would ruin racing). And you can’t remove descents altogether, unless you always finish at the top of a hill

You could however (going back to my earlier point) insist all bikes have round tubes, and ban deep section wheels and all aero clothing, which would bring down the speeds they reach. Once you factor in bigger gripper tyres and disk brakes you’d like to think that this would mean bikes are no faster down hill than they use to be, but can stop quicker and corner more effectively. As such bike racing SHOULD be safer

The other option would be to impose a time penalty for crashing. Ie come off your bike, it’s a 5 min penalty. Some of the guys at the front would probably think harder about really pushing the limits for a few second advantage. However I suspect risk takers will always be just that..

One thing  that I think should be in place is a mechanism for ensuring riders have paid their dues in a competitive race environment before being let loose in the pro peleton. Going back to the point about snapping up riders due to their power numbers, an observation was made by an ex pro that riders no longer spend years refining their race craft as an amateur before gaining a pro license, which contributes to crashes in the peleton

This list of all cycling deaths might shed some light on the discussion. It’s interesting to note that quite a few of the deaths recorded are as a result of Sudden Cardiac Death

Another list to have a look at would be this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_racing_cyclists_and_pacemakers_with_a_cycling-related_death

Excluding deaths during track cycling, mountain biking, and gravel (and deaths due to non-crash related causes):

5 riders died in the 70s

5 riders died in the 80s

3 died during the 90s

5 died during the 00s

12 died during the 10s

3 so far this decade (don’t forget Covid affecting racing)

It’d be a very significant rule change because, as things stand, the TRANSMISSION of data from a rider to “others” (including the team car) is banned. You can talk by radio, that’s fine. However the team car cannot access anything from the rider’s head unit or any metrics around HR, body temperature etc.

If there was a strong enough desire to do something about it, a solution which improves things without any significant rule changes could be rolled out reasonably quickly.

Maybe not actual transmission of data though – because that requires each rider to have adequate data coverage for the entire duration of the race. But it would not be a massive undertaking to have a transponder based system and an increased number of checkpoints throughout the course. The checkpoints are responsible for transmitting data confirming each rider as they pass, and automation in whatever passes for race control would be able to flag up a missing rider reasonably quickly.

Sure, it wouldn’t give the same positional accuracy as GPS, but would at least provide an early warning that something is not right.

(They may already have this, if so, just put more checkpoints in?)

“It’d be a very significant rule change”

So what? Rules are just words written on paper. It’s technically trivial.

I suspect that the bike tech advancing quicker than riders abilities at speed is the key factor here, so the only “rules” that could change would be to slow the bikes down again. A speed limit for descending, regardless of the need for safety,  is pretty impractical.

Left field thinking…

You aren’t allowed to pedal on the descents…

Not only would it significantly slow things down, but also would massively even the playing field on mountain stages. Those skinny mountain goats would be at a huge disadvantage on the descents due to lack of weight!

It’s obviously a terrible idea, but I’d be interested to see what, if any, difference it makes to results in a grand tour..

12 died during the 10s

If I read that list correctly, it looks like 7 riders died due to crashing during descents in the 10s, so I’m not sure it is evidence of a significant increase, compared to previous decades.

I suspect bikes were optimised for what they do 99% of the time, not their handling at 100km/hr.  I’m a lot more confident on my girlfriends shopping bike going downhill than I am on my road bike but I doubt I’m going much faster.

Downhills have become more important in terms of being able to launch attacks but they are still a tiny part of what the riders do in a bike race.  The bikes are still designed for climbing and riding on the flat.

Yes, but any attempt to make the bike “better” would only increase the speed in the one place they crash, fast corners.

Same with other leftfield ideas suggested like no pedaling or speed limits. All you’re doing is making the corners even more important.

If you want slower corners, make them ride 21mm tyres with rubber hard enough to last the entire professional season.  They’d be sliding everywhere but would be doing it at a crawling pace.

If I read that list correctly, it looks like 7 riders died due to crashing during descents in the 10s, so I’m not sure it is evidence of a significant increase, compared to previous decades.

I still read it as 12 unless we’re using different criteria.  Or did you exclude crashes involving vehicles?

Yes, but any attempt to make the bike “better” would only increase the speed in the one place they crash, fast corners.

See, I’m not sure that’s the case.  If you asked most people if they are more likely to crash on the mountain bike they were riding in 2008 vs the one they are riding today (riding the same trail) I think most people would say they not only would the on they ride today be much faster with longer wheelbase and slacker angles (even with less suspension) but they’d be safer as well due to the increased control.

The one argument I don’t hear on here very often is older mountain bikes are safer.

I think historically a rider could get away with just being OK at descending but I doubt that’s true in the modern peloton

It unfortunately is, there are current professionals who i would not want to be descending near. Probably not as many as 25 odd years ago, but still too many.
Christ, 25 odd years ago i would occasionally end up with whole bikes i didn’t want to descend on… So making the bikes “better” at descending won’t work, making them worse for descending wouldn’t work particularly well either.

I’d approach using the list of deaths as a source of evidence for this with caution. The pattern of participation has changed a lot in that timeframe (eg way more womens races on the road) and the numbers are all quite small (statistically speaking). With a bit of careful thought another metric such as deaths-per-person-race-participation-days might give a clearer picture.

As for slowng the riders down, the only one that seems like it would work technically is banning aero stuff. That would then of course push up against a big part of the business model of the sport and perhaps lead to people looking to increase their speed*.

Perhaps the best way forward in the first instance is as Adam Hansen suggests improving the systems and safety precautions to reduce the consequences of crashes. I gather some races have really upped their game in terms of barriers, nets, padding etc and it would be good to see the UCI have some teeth in enforcing their use in all races.

*I don’t just mean doping, but yeah, that too.

Or did you exclude crashes involving vehicles?

I counted crashes during mountain road descents, as per the discussion. In fact, I incorrectly included some from the 20s, so I make it 5 riders for the 10s:

Thomas Casarotto

Wouter Weylandt

Bahman Golbarnezhad

Chad Young

Mathieu Riebel

The other deaths, as far as I can make out were in different circumstances (e.g. Wouter Dewilde died after crashing on the finish line). I don’t see convincing evidence that descending per se has become more dangerous.

improving the systems and safety precautions to reduce the consequences of crashes

Yes, I think race safety is pretty well understood, and there are proven ways of making things safer, without introducing complicated new technical “solutions”. It’s a question of spending more money on the things that are known to work.

Perhaps the best way forward in the first instance is as Adam Hansen suggests improving the systems and safety precautions to reduce the consequences of crashes. I gather some races have really upped their game in terms of barriers, nets, padding etc and it would be good to see the UCI have some teeth in enforcing their use in all races.

That is far and away the easiest and cheapest and the one that relies on the least amount of extra tech, the least amount of buy in from teams and riders and the least amount of rule changes.

If you have a “secluded spot” or a cliff edge, you put enough nets, barriers, marshals etc on it to ensure that no-one can disappear off the edge.

The Olympics and Worlds already use a volunteer team in the hundreds, if not thousands. Having “line of sight” marshals is already standard at CX, crit etc (although obviously those are far smaller and more compact courses).

So a marshal – even a volunteer one – every 100m along a remote woodland section is certainly achievable.

Where it would get tricky is on a 200km linear route across 4 mountains as with a Grand Tour stage but on a closed World Champs loop, it’s eminently practical plus you’d only need them on true remote stretches, not in areas where there’s loads of spectators, static cameras etc.

I counted crashes during mountain road descents, as per the discussion. In fact, I incorrectly included some from the 20s, so I make it 5 riders for the 10s:

Then I think you’ll have to go back through all the other decades with your criteria. For example, I only see one death from a descent in the 00s.

Small numbers don’t make for great analysis, but going from one in ten years to five in ten years (and even worse, three already this decade even with COVID) is not great.

If it is purely down to participation numbers the safety still has to be improved. A sport that is seen to be killing people/kids every year needs to fix some stuff before it’s seen to be trying to get even bigger.

Not thought this through entirely so feel free to criticize but what about time penalties if the rider is under a certain time on a descent segment.

Eg: in advance e of the race, an experienced pro sets a reasonably/safe time for each “alpine descent” and any rider who is under that time is penalized by 2x the number of seconds of the delta (a bit like Strava live segments)

The UCI would have to mandate that head units somehow flagged up the target times and (audibly?) warn the riders if they are exceeding the ave speed.

Potential penalities would have to determined in real-time so everyone understands what is happening.

The objective would be cap speeds like they used to do in road rallying BITD

I’ve no idea how such tech would need to be tweaked for poor weather conditions…

Discuss….

Discuss….

It wouldn’t take into account weather conditions – if the “target time” was set during a headwind but on race day it’s a tailwind is an obvious one. Likewise it would depend on the race situation.

Imagine if the descent that Tom Pidcock used to set up his Alpe d’Huez stage win was set by some “pro”, then TP blasts past it by minutes because the race situation is that he’s out on a long-range lone attack, he wins on the Alpe and then gets DQ’d for being too good!

That’d make a bit of a mockery of the sport. “Sorry Tom, in a sport that is literally about being the fastest between A and B, you were too fast.”
Kind of like DQing Lewis Hamilton for being faster than The Stig on a lap of Monaco.

Even the heavyweight / not-climber sprinters aren’t allowed to be too slow. Sorry lads, we know you’re composed of entirely fast-twitch muscle and you weight 85kg but you still need to finish in under +15% of the winner’s time, hurry the **** up. (which by the weay usually leads to the dropped sprinters at the back of the race descending like absolute demons to make the time cut, it literally forces and rewards radical descending! It’s rarely caught on TV cos they’re way out the back of the actual race that’s happening but sprinters are known to descend like rockets, risking it all to get inside the time cut).

I’m not convinced that tech is the answer to any of this, much as it gets touted as the magical solution for everything from climate change to everyday chores.

I’m a little bit surprised about switching off Garmin crash detection because of false positives. Presumably it’s a pain because it beeps and you have to cancel it. You cancel it because you can, that’s not what it’s for, it’s for when you can’t.