"Why not allow substitutes when a rider is forced to abandon a Grand Tour during the first week?" - Movistar boss calls for drastic changes

Eusebio Unzué, the boss of Movistar Team, speaking to L'Equipe just before the start of a Tour Colombia, spoke at length about the future of the sport, his plans for change and why a potential 'Super League' is an appealing proposition.

"We are thinking about the future of the sport, and we are among those holding meetings. Cycling is the most immobile sport at the moment, we continue to do things as we did forty years ago, when I arrived. We have to humanize the rules. Stop being so crude, so excessively inhuman," says Unzue. "All the teams prepare with ten or eleven riders, we leave two or three at home at the last moment, and if a rider falls, he has no right to any solution...", the Movistar Team director continued to argue.

Unzué doesn't understand that when a rider falls in a race he is not immediately attended to. "Nowadays, for a rider who falls to be able to go out again the next day, sometimes he has to ride 60 or 80 kilometres with a broken wrist, because they can only go to be examined when they have already arrived, after having suffered like an animal," he explains. "Can't we really humanize this? If a rider falls, isn't that reason enough for him to go to an ambulance and see if he has something broken, in which case he can go out again the next day without having to finish the stage? We are not going to ask, as in football, to stop everything while the cyclists recover. But we have to protect their health. Even if that means reclassifying the cyclists in question in the time of the last one, so that no one benefits from a fall, but to prevent them from suffering unnecessarily."

"Why not allow substitutes when a rider is forced to abandon a Grand Tour during the first week?" Unzue questions in conclusion, a topic experienced recently by Movistar Team as Enric Mas crashed out of the Tour de France on stage 1. "All teams prepare 10-12 riders for a Grand Tour, so you still got 2 or 3 of them at home."