"This is and remains a bad image for the race" - Quick-Step DS questions Tre Valli Varesine race organisers after mid-race cancellation

In miserable, wet and downright dangerous conditions at Tre Valli Varesine 2024 this Tuesday afternoon, only after the women's race had been completed and nearly 60km of the men's race in the legs, the decision was finally made to cancel this year's edition.

For some, the decision came as a relief, with riders rushing into the warmth and safety of their respective team buses once the cancellation was confirmed. For others though, thoughts immediately turned to how things could, and maybe should, have been done differently. One such voice of discontent came from Soudal - Quick-Step sports director, Klaas Lodewyck.

"The bad weather that was predicted yesterday and this morning also got to us. Then you know it's dangerous racing. So I really don't understand why there was another lap here," he ponders in post-race quotes collected by HLN. "That water bomb caused manhole covers to come off on the descent. For the same money, 30 riders could have crashed there. Knowing that someone else died at the World Championship in Switzerland, I can't quite get my head around that," he adds, referring to Muriel Furrer's tragic death in the women's junior road race in Zurich recently.

“But it’s like always: one wanted to race, the other didn’t. A decision is never made as a whole. And then you have something like this of course," Lodewyck concludes, even coming up with a proposal he believes could have made everyone happy. "Because this is and remains a bad image for the race of course. The organization wanted to do an extra lap to have the promised better weather, but the riders didn’t like that. They could have just postponed the race a bit longer. Then we would have seen a good two hours of beautiful racing.”

For the likes of Soudal - Quick-Step's Remco Evenepoel and pre-race favourite Tadej Pogacar, attention now turns to the weekend and to the final monument of the season... Il Lombardia.