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- I will admit to nearly pulling onto the road at the top of the Tourmalet when a Espoires race was coming through a number of years ago, the rolling road wasn't exactly policed that well.
I will plead very ignorant Scotsman, I was so dumbfounded at myself at what I'd very nearly done, I didn't think to jump out the car and take pictures!!
I guess my message is that unless its very well policed or you have inate knowledge of what's happening it would be quite easy to pull onto a road inadvertently. However where you know a race is in progress there is absolutely no excuse to venture on the roads.
- Far more interesting, did he also get punished?
- This is true, but, having ben on both sides, there arr situations where as a rider you genuinely can’t hear much behind you for all the white noise (wind, engine, tires, etc.) and that’s without even having earphones. But seriously, this gendarmes explanation sound like a cheap cop (yes, pun intended) out. You cannot possibly expect any motorised gendarme, no matter how skilled, to manage road junctions up ahead if they are also falling behind, that totally unserious. If the gendarmes are to control traffic, there needs to be one staying up front at ALL (absolute bare minimum, even 2 is dodgy, 3 relaying would be considered workable unless of course there are unmanned crossings every few hundred meters.
Can you imagine they would move around like that with no plan when escorting heads of state or sensitive prisoners, NEVER happens, for good reason, you cannot prepare for what’s up ahead that way.
Heck, in the TdF TTs EVERY rider is accompanied by at least one gendarme.
- That is simply not acceptable. I'm glad these teams left the race. BTW, that's how these things are supposed to be decided, by the riders and teams, not by a massive international cycling body that thinks its job is to control-freak at everything everywhere. And, it's quite obvious, the UCI is utterly failing to do its job, or these incidents wouldn't be happening!
- I’ve seen this first hand. You can be behind a rider screaming at them to move over, and they pretend you are not there.
The UCI could use their yellow cards for this.
Promoters maybe are hiring too few motor marshals. And,
The riders and DS’s need to grow up
- I don’t know where this website bought its clock but your post was timed at 24:16 ;-)
- Drama time
- Yes but nowhere near as big a disaster as the Itzulia last year, different part of safety but it as Mallorca just showed too, riders won’t put up with being forced into avoidable dangers so easily anymore. It will still take a while before organisers realise they will lose out in the end. We are still lucky that most of these are kind of close calls, any one of them could have been deadly (let’s not even discuss numbers). Take the reversing mini for example, had it turned the corner 20 seconds later, the driver would maybe only have looked left as you are taught for this situation because you are not told to check trafic on the right that might be on the wrong side of the road (e.g. overtaking where it’s usually forbidden). It would have accelerated head on into dozens of riders coming at 40, 50 or more km/h, not much remains whole then.
- So much for the locals being massacred then. I guess as long as we continue to have access to the artificially low priced exploited ressources there and can enrich ourselves on stock markets investing in arms manufacturers, worrying about sports events is about the most upsetting thing that can happen to us right?
- Shame but kind of justified, might be the only way to get organisers and UCI to start doing more from their side, and no-one is asking the world.