Perhaps You Do Not Wish to See
In which a Paris-Roubaix preview gets eaten by a discussion about rider safety
When I discuss a race, or a big moment in a race, I usually like to embed a YouTube clip so readers know what I’m talking about. These races take place early in the morning on obscure streaming services in the U.S., and this newsletter is ostensibly for casual fans—I’m not going to fly in assuming that everyone’s keeping up with Stage 4 of the Tour of the Basque Country.
I can’t do that this time, because my usual source for those videos, Eurosport’s YouTube channel, has as of this writing not posted a stage highlight video. If you have FloBikes and a VPN, you can go see the incident in question, which is what I did, but for the rest of you: There were no stage highlights.
At least, no highlights worth talking about. With about 35 kilometers to go, the peloton was coming around a moderate right-hand corner on a descent when Remco Evenepoel, in second position, had his back wheel rubbed by a Lidl-Trek rider Natnael Tesfatsion, which touched off a massive Talladega-style crash behind the pair.
Any loss of control going around a corner at something like 60 kilometers an hour is going to send riders off the road, and once one rider goes, he’s going to take others with him.
All in all, about a dozen riders ended up on the ground. Eleven riders DNF’d the stage, though I don’t know if that maps exactly onto the list of riders who came to grief in this incident. That list is extensive, the riders notable, the injuries severe.
Evenepoel broke his collarbone and his right scapula. Jay Vine suffered fractures to three vertebrae. Steff Cras suffered a punctured lung, two broken vertebrae, and “several” fractured ribs. Jonas Vingegaard looked like he came off worst—it’s never a good sign when it needs to be reported that an injured athlete is conscious—and it was a relief when Visma-Lease a Bike announced that he’d only suffered a broken collarbone and broken ribs. Tesfatsion, somehow, came away with nothing but scrapes and bruises. So did Primož Roglič, who’d been leading the race despite having already crashed heavily the day before.
This is the single most important event of the cycling calendar so far, including the two monuments that are already behind us. It took out three of the top four stage racers in the world, with two of them suffering injuries serious enough to possibly imperil their participation in the Tour de France. Evenepoel, the two-time defending champion of Liège–Bastogne–Liège, is definitely out of the Ardennes classics.
Admittedly, this is not an ideal time to have one’s last newsletter be a joke post about causing riders to crash.
Cycling is dangerous. On descents, riders go around blind corners with minimal knowledge of the course at 60 or 70 miles an hour. Riders speed past cars while wearing a helmet and a bodysuit that’s no thicker than your MeUndies boxer briefs. Maybe there’s something more to be done to armor up the riders—the UCI didn’t make helmets compulsory until 2003, for God’s sake—but no one serious is proposing that riders go up and down the Poggio wearing kevlar breastplates and motorcycle leathers. That’d cause as many safety problems as it solved.
Motorsports have become about as safe as is practicable at two or three times that speed, not only because the drivers are wrapped in fireproof fabric and strapped into an indestructible steel or carbon fiber frame, but because anything they could possibly run into is padded.
That last part is the key.
This weekend, Formula 1 is racing at the Suzuka circuit in Japan. Ten years ago, that was the site of F1’s last on-track fatality, when in rainy conditions, Jules Bianchi spun off the course and hit a crane that was recovering another crashed car. The survival cell in a racing car is built to take one impact, and it helps when the stationary object that the car crashes into is built to disperse the kinetic energy of the impact. Hence the tire walls and styrofoam barriers that line the outside of fast corners on racetracks all over the world.
That’s not exactly doable on a stage race course that covers hundreds or even thousands of miles. Nevertheless, you will see hay bales or padding or even a guy in a reflective vest with a flag posted around dangerous obstacles.1 This very corner featured a padded barrier, but it ended before the area where the riders slid off the road.
And it’s curious why the padding stopped, because some of the riders who crashed ended up in a culvert, part of which was lined with concrete. The rest went into the grass beyond, which was lined with trees and man-sized boulders.
Evenepoel actually pulled off an incredible maneuver, bunny-hopping the ditch entirely. He got so much air I reflexively want to say that he ollied the guardrail. But when he landed in the gras, his front wheel dug in, and he broke his collarbone anyway. When you’re traveling that fast, crashing headfirst into a bag of marshmallows can still cause devastating injuries.
The Tour of the Basque Country crash came right as rider safety was at the forefront of cycling discourse. The Paris-Roubaix organizers made a subtle change to the parcours this week; one of the key locations in the race is the entry to the cobbled path through the Arenberg Forest. Because riders are sprinting to the front of the peloton in order to jockey for position on this narrow road, and because the road surface changes abruptly from tarmac to pavé, this transition is a magnet for high-speed crashes.
So the organizers installed a chicane2 right before the entrance to slow the riders down. Actually, it’s not really a chicane as I understand the term; it’s a 90-degree right-hand turn followed by a left hairpin, followed by another 90-degree right-hander. It will absolutely slow the riders down. I am not entirely convinced it will prevent crashes.
I’m not sure why anyone would find this offensive, but it’s proved controversial. And as the criticism reached a hysterical pitch, so too did all the discourse around the chicane. Matteo Jorgenson weighed in with the following tweet:
Is this what fans want to see? Riders completely covered in blood after sliding face-first at 50mph/80kph on sharp rocks in a forest? I’ll take a couple of turns and some guys sliding out on pavement any day…
Jorgenson punctuated his point with a photo from the 2016 race of Australian rider Mitch Docker, seated on the ground and covered head to toe in blood after wiping out on the Arenberg. Jorgenson also tagged Docker in the photo and provided a link to video of the incident to emphasize his point.3
But the question Jorgenson asks is an important one. The important one, as I’ve taken more than 1,000 words to get to the point. Is this—crashes, injuries, and so on—what fans want to see?
And to a certain extent, yes, it is.
Nobody in their right mind is rooting for Jay Vine to break his back or for Remco to spend Ardennes Week wearing street clothes and a sling. But, like, here’s a compilation NBC put together of all the big crashes in the Tour de France from three years ago.
I don’t think fans want to see crashes so much as they want to have the threat of crashes, which could throw a seemingly-settled race into chaos. They want to experience, if only secondhand, the danger these riders put themselves in, and to marvel at the bravado necessary to come through it upright and unscathed.
And as much as riders want to stay safe, the peril of races like Paris-Roubaix is a big part of the reason why great cyclists earn hero status. Hell, at Paris-Roubaix, anyone who even finishes is a hero. But survival is only worth celebrating if there’s peril involved. Otherwise, it’s just existence.
As much as great riders need stamina and technique, they also need courage. How incredible is it that Matej Mohorič can win Milan-San Remo or Tom Pidcock can win on Alpe D’Huez on sheer daredevil audacity? Eliminating that would absolutely diminish the sport.
But organizers can reduce unnecessary risk. Eliminating all serious injury isn’t possible, but putting extra thought into course design—including adding a chicane at the entry to the Arenberg—can dial back risk at the margins. Putting hay bales in front of telephone poles and walls on descents, eliminating late corners in sprint finishes and enforcing deviation rules, all of that adds up to leave less and less of riders’ physical safety to chance.
With all that said, the TV coverage of the Tour of the Basque Country crash made it hard to dispute the charge that coverage of crashes can be callous and voyeuristic. Adam Hansen, the retired Australian rider who currently serves as president of the cyclists’ trade union, criticized the TV directors for continuing to film the crash scene as riders were loaded into ambulances. Mark Cavendish’s wife was among those who expressed similar thoughts.
The question of whether and how much to show injuries at sporting events is by no means unique to cycling. And generally speaking, I come down pretty hard on the side of showing more.
Sports might be entertainment, but sports coverage—whether that’s independent journalism or event broadcasting—is news. You have to show what’s going on so the viewers can understand. That means not only showing the incident or injury live, but replaying it, sometimes more than once and from different angles, until the severity of what happened filters through the television.
In her criticism of the broadcast footage, Mrs. Cavendish acknowledged that hers is not a universal outlook—that sometimes, families of riders involved in a crash have no other way of knowing if their child or partner or sibling is conscious or ambulatory until they see it on TV. Fans might not have that kind of connection to the riders, but as ghastly as Vingegaard’s crash was, and as over-the-top as the TV footage was, it was clear within moments that he was conscious and moving his arms. Cutting away might have led some to fear the worst.
The other reason I’m generally in favor of showing more of injuries is that cutting away, making editorial decisions in order to suit the most squeamish person in the audience, insulates the viewer from the very serious real-life stakes of an undertaking that they might otherwise trivialize.
In cycling, who gives a shit? But in the real world, this editorial conservatism fosters a more violent world. Graphic images traumatize people because the acts that produce graphic images are, in fact, traumatic. We tolerate gun violence when shootings are on the news as numbers instead of footage of wounded people. We ignore the impact of poverty and disease, accept unthinkable casualties in war, because we prioritize the comfort of the viewer over reporting the truth in its fullness.
For anecdotal evidence, see this crash and the reaction to it. When Wout van Aert went down at Dwars Door Vlaanderen, the coverage was more tasteful and the reaction more muted. At Tour of the Basque Country, the crash was shown live, then on replay, from different angles. Then for about eight minutes there was an uninterrupted cycle of replays, followed by live helicopter shots of riders being treated by the side of the road and loaded into ambulances. Even when the race was neutralized, the coverage of the recovery operation continued.
That’s what Hansen and Cavendish were objecting to—not the third or fourth viewing, or the quick scan around the scene to see who’d been taken down—but the unblinking, uninterrupted shots of bloodied riders in a ditch. Even I think that’s too far.
There’s informative, and then there’s inhumane.
I guess I should do at least a perfunctory Paris-Roubaix preview. It’s mostly flat, 260 kilometers long with 30 cobbled sectors for the men, 148.5 kilometers and 17 cobbled sections for the ladies. The lack of even short climbs, such as are found at Tour of Flanders, chases off most of the puncheurs, resulting in pretty specialized startlists in both races.
On the men’s side, the full starting rosters aren’t yet out as of this writing. But from the limited names available the favorite, once again, is Mathieu van der Poel. And once again, he’ll have Jasper Philipsen on his team as a strategic fallback option. Those two finished first and third last year.
Visma-Lease a Bike brings about as strong a team as it can with van Aert out of commission: Jorgenson, 2022 winner Dylan van Baarle, and Christophe Laporte. Those three could gang up on van der Poel and work him over. So could Lidl-Trek’s duo of Mads Pedersen and Jonathan Milan, especially with Tim “The Tractor” Declercq at the front of the group. I am dying for Milan to have that one huge classics brekathrough. It is going to happen someday, I promise.
I can also see a (somewhat unlikely) scenario unfolding in which Stefan Küng gets one-on-one with van der Poel and just leans on him until he blows up near the finish line, as Pedersen did at Gent-Wevelgem and Kasper Asgreen did at the Tour of Flanders in 2021. Asgreen also takes the start, along with van der Poel’s former sprinting buddy, Tim Merlier.
Josh Tarling has impressed me so far this classics season, and his size and time trial ability could play up in a race that’s mostly about hanging on for dear life and not getting bounced off the road. But winning Paris-Roubaix just two months after turning 20…if it happens they’ll make a movie about it.
The women’s peloton has been reduced even more by the peculiar demands of Paris-Roubaix. Lidl-Trek is not bringing its dynamite combination of Elisa Longo Borghini and Shirin van Anrooij; those two have been great this spring, culminating in their 1-3 finish at Ronde van Vlaanderen. They are taking Elisa Balsamo, Ellen van Dijk, and Lucinda Brand, which is the closest thing women’s cycling has to a goal line package. Balsamo should be among the favorites.
But there’s also no Demi Vollering, no Kasia Niewiadamoa, no Puck Pieterse and (somewhat more surprisingly) no Chloe Dygert.
Marianne Vos starts this race for the second time. She finished fourth in the favorites’ group and 10th overall last year, and is in incredible form. She’s finished in the top 10 in all four of her one-day races this season, with two wins. I think Lotte Kopecky showed enough weakness at Ronde van Vlaanderen last week to make Vos the co-favorite. This race is flat and hugely demanding from a bikehandling perspective; both of those factors favor Vos. Pfeiffer Georgi finished ahead of Vos in that group last year, and returns for another shot on the cobbles, though she’s been a little quieter this spring.
Nevertheless, Kopecky is probably the heavy favorite once again. And like van der Poel, she’ll have one of the top sprinters in the world, Lorena Wiebes, in her hip pocket in case things go south.
So let’s end on a prediction, with the caveat that, again, the whole men’s startlist isn’t out yet: van der Poel wins the men’s race, ahead of Pedersen and Küng. Vos wins the women’s race, ahead of Balsamo and Kopecky.
When Chloe Dygert crashed at the 2020 World Time Trial Championship, there was a controversy over why the Armco barrier she hit didn’t have padding to lessen the impact; as it stood, the metal guardrail sliced her thigh almost all the way to the bone.
“chicane” is one of my favorite words
Not sure how Docker feels about this. He’s just minding his own business Thursday morning and his phone blows up with notifications about the time he came out of Paris-Roubaix looking like Pinbacker from Sunshine.