Matteo Trentin calls on peloton to further advocate for cycling safety

Being a part of the UCI’s Security and Technical Regulations working group alongside Philippe Gilbert, Matteo Trentin has been one of the biggest advocates for safety within the peloton in the last few years, and recently he has once again spoken about one of the ongoing debates.

“Of course, the point of Chris of training on the road with the TT bike is correct, but I would add that it's not a TT bike problem; the problem is the traffic, the problem is the amount of people in cars today. Actually, even the small roads in the countryside can be dangerous, but it's not because you have a TT bike; it's because you have a bike," Trentin said in an interview with Cyclingnews. After the accident of Egan Bernal whilst on a training ride in Colombia, several pros including Chris Froome have came out supportive of a ban of time-trial bikes within cycling, after he suffered from a career-changing accident aswell back at the 2019 Critérium du Dauphiné.

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He added: “You're not protected from crashing into a car, and people are getting more and more anxious to pass a bike for basically no reason. It's actually a problem of how people are thinking sitting in a car, or maybe also sometimes how cyclists are thinking sitting on a bike. It has to be nicer. Sharing the roads has to be nicer than it is now.”

“The bigger user of the roads on the bike are tourists or even kids going to school or people going to work, and we need to be more concerned about them than about us. It's our job, we know how to act on the road," he said, separating the issues ongoing in professional cycling with those experienced by cyclists and bicycle users on a daily basis.

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Trentin has recently said in an interview that roads are "more of a jungle than a proper training environment", and despite professional riders having more possibilities of relocating to more safe locations for training on a daily basis, they often don't have the possibilities due to their personal life. Trentin has been very vocal about several topics in rider safety, with examples of the barrier quality, number of vehicles when it comes to vital issues, but also vocal on more popularized topics like the ban of the 'supertuck' in which he claimed to send over 800 mails to fellow professionals and only 16 downloaded the information, hitting back on the peloton saying "Maybe they should spend less time on TikTok and be proactive when it comes to making cycling safer."

He concluded by making another call, this time advocating for general cycling safety: “Be more involved in spreading the message to the world, even in the races — something we don't do for the moment. It's something like when the races become a breakthrough problem in the sport. Every sport sends a message. For the future of cycling, which parents are going to have their kids at 12 or 13 going on the road? I think nobody. If you want to have riders in 20 years’ time you need to solve this problem, you need to address this problem.”