Crashes, what can be done?

[CyclistAbi]

@RedheadDane

Yesterday i would agree. Today i have seen riders asking questions like who are the people responsible for safety in pro peloton? Nobody seemed to know. Riders putting their partial interests aside and speaking out. Achieving things.

After all we have seen a sprint stage on where GC riders with no real initiative to contest the sprint, due to poor safety, where separated from actual contesters. Now people are claiming it didn't work. And the earth is still flat.

Somebody has actually put some air in the bags and secured the exposed sections with such barriers at the Tour. Things that felt are light years away. All that already happened.

So. Improvements in apparel are in my opinion closer that one might think. As this is what will actually prevent the injury from happening most of the times. Protective apparel. Maybe next season already. We'll see.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

I'm willing to bet that protective collarbone apparel will not be added to the péloton next season.

There was nothing wrong with stage 2, we've seen races like Gent-Wevelgem 2015 or stage 11 of the 2010 Giro where they had to deal with worse for longer. If stage 1 isn't a complete mess, the riders just suck it up and ride stage 2. But after the complete farce of the TTT, the riders weren't happy and, as usual, the organisers rolled over and played dead. There was nothing stopping them doing something like in stage 1 of the 2020 Tour, and neutralising things until they got to the final few kilometres where the weather was less bad. Then it'd have been infinitely better: the part of the course that was actually dangerous would have been ridden safely, and the part of the course that wasn't would have been raced. Instead they raced the part that was dangerous and then sat up and scratched their butts on the part that was safe.

If you want to make flat stages safe for GC contenders, since in reality that was your original crusade in this thread (seeing as apparently we don't care if sprinters get injured?), then the onus is on the organisers to arrange safer finishes. And stop riders from divebombing corners like absolute morons, because that's not the organisers' fault. If we're pinning that kind of thing on the organisers, then why not just make them set 'liaison' stages where the GC doesn't matter, like in Paris-Dakar, and the GC riders can have a nice cyclotourist stroll like they did on the finishing circuit on Sunday, the sprinters can turn on the jets in the last few kilometres, and you don't have to worry your sweet little head about Primož Roglič falling over.

Or hell, just do the whole thing on Zwift to get rid of that pesky danger factor, that seems to be the way the péloton is leaning.

 

[RedheadDane]

Somebody has actually put some air in the bags and secured the exposed sections with such barriers at the Tour. Things that felt are light years away. All that already happened.

And all that's being done to prevent serious injury. If it prevents a few collarbones from being broken, that's a nice added bonus, but nobody considers preventing collarbones from being broken the number one priority.

Sure, I get that a broken collarbone is probably quite painful, and it's annoying to be out for around 6 weeks, but on the grand scale of things, they're not that serious an injury.