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Tour de Pologne 2020

Page 13 - Get up to date with the latest news, scores & standings from the Cycling News Community.
"I don't do this all the time" does not make for a great defense

I’m not at all defending him.

But patterns do matter. A first offence can be very serious on its own, but it will be aggravated by a series of similar prior offences. To use Logic Is Your Friends example, most countries if you get caught drink driving you will lose your licence. If you get caught a bunch of times, you will go to prison.
 
The problem is not this single incident. What Groenewegen did is common among sprinters even though it's clearly against the rules. Just enforce those rules consistently. It would be unfair to punish Groenewegen with exceptional severity for something that already has a clear punishment as per the rules, so apply those and let the actual justice system deal with any criminal liabilities. The answer is not to chase out of the sport those riders who cause particularly unfortunate accidents due to bad luck. Punish the behaviour, not the random consequences.

But also, Groenewegen has previous. Yes, there was a lot of bad luck involved, but that should also make Groenewegen and everyone else think that this kind of reckless behaviour always puts them a stroke of bad luck away from causing a tragedy.
I agree punish the transgression not the outcome of it. However that requires commissaires who understand the rules, are independent and can look at each incident on it's merits. Had the deviation and blocking occurred with no injury Groeoewegen, Cavendish, Ewan, Demare would have kept the race but Bouhanni would have been dqd.
 
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The UCI wants to do something as far as discipline.

Theo Bos was suspended for a month. Hopefully he gets at least two months. I don't know that I'll want to see him at the Giro.

Frustrating thing is it really didn't have to happen. He had plenty of time to change his course of action and sprint Fabio head to head but he was determined to block off the right side.
 
NYipaYj.png
 
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Yes, it is a decision as well, but unlike with a descent, you can not make up for it in the following kilometers and you are at the mercy of others, as i explained. And you know very well that a GC rider will not stay at the back of the peloton, unless he is ensured not to lose time, and as a result, he will get involved in what will needlessly worsen the situation. And for what? For not losing 5 seconds in GC. And considering they all try to be in the front, the result is that this scenario basically never happens with the big favorites anyway. When's the last time a sprint finish decided the GC result? How often does it happen? Right.


I don't drink and drive EVERYDAY officer!
Ever seen a stage that ends with a descent. I have. In a sprint finish the GC rider makes the same decision he also makes in a descent. Take a risk or lose time.
The result of a sprint finish may not decide the winner but it nevertheless has an impact and influences the dynamic of the race. As it should. If a strong climber loses 20s in the first week of a GT he is more likely to attack. If the same happens to a stronger time trialist he may have to ride more agressive because he lost some of his advantage.
Just like descending staying in position is a skill as well. There is a reason why some riders are rarely losing time while others are gaped all the time. Contrary to some peoples believes GC riding involves more than just climbing and time trialing. Personally I want to watch races. If you prefer a simple W/kg contest virtual racing is always an option.
 
Cycling is a very dangerous sport, we do agree. Potholes, barriers, wet roads, narrow roads, wind, dumb fans, riders making stupid mistakes, riders making no mistakes but having terrible bad luck, riders crashing because other riders made stupid mistakes or having terrible bad luck.

But until today I haven't seen a crash caused by a deliberate illegal move to cause directly life threatening injuries to another rider.
 
Theo Bos was suspended for a month. Hopefully he gets at least two months. I don't know that I'll want to see him at the Giro.

Frustrating thing is it really didn't have to happen. He had plenty of time to change his course of action and sprint Fabio head to head but he was determined to block off the right side.

Bos's attitude was, imo, way more intentional and aggressive than this one. Unfortunately, today the speed and the street made the consequences way more severe.
 
That’s all a good sign, but I don’t believe there’s any way that can say there’s no brain damage until several days or even weeks from now. Perhaps they mean there no obvious/visible damage to brain tissue. Not meaning to criticize anyone—I realize we’re losing some nuance with translations, especially regarding medical terminology.
 
There have been a good few crashes that can be used as precedents here, the problem is that it borrows elements from all of them.
I can't imagine going on as a rider in this race while Jakobsen is fighting for his life.
Some people may withdraw, but most won't. Maybe Fabio's teammates will feel uncomfortable with it. I remember stories of Fabian Wegmann (at least I believe it was him) shacking down on the floor of another room because he was rooming with Wouter Weylandt in the 2011 Giro and didn't want to be alone the night before the parade stage. Matteo Pelucchi left the sport for months to practically live at the hospital while his fiancée recovered from her career-ending injury that left her paralysed from the waist down. These things can affect people. But at the same time, the péloton raced on in the 2011 Tour de Suisse when Juan Mauricio Soler was facing potential brain surgery; they raced on in San Luís after Malori's horrific injury. It's a strange sport like that. It's one of the most respectful, and simultaneously one of the strangest in its reactions to the hazards of the road. The péloton unites when one of its number falls; we've seen a few heart-breaking parades in our time, and there are things that I remember vividly about the way the sport honours its fallen. Tomasz Marczynski pinning Lambrecht's race number to his heart, Leopard Trek letting Tyler Farrar join the parade as they crossed the line, Lance Armstrong's finest career moment, winning a 1995 Tour stage and pointing to the heavens for Fabio Casartelli. To this day I will always have a soft spot for Vasil Kiryienka regardless of years as part of the race-stifling apparatus at Sky, because of his 2011 Giro stage win honouring Xavi Tondó - but simultaneously I still resent that his pride meant he put his sunglasses on at the line so the photos wouldn't show his tears.

It's a strange paradox of a sport. It will go to these lengths to honour its fallen comrades, and yet, a day of mourning is taken, and then it's back to business, save for the occasional sop to safety like the cancellation of Monte Crostis in 2011 after some misleading photographs and with an understandably nervy péloton made it perceived to be necessary. It's almost like it's Formula 1 in the 1960s, when Jackie Stewart was being mocked and laughed at as a coward for wanting to improve safety, because it "wouldn't be racing" if it were neutered for safety, as if Stirling Moss being told by his co-driver at a driver change in the 24h Spa to "watch out for body parts at the Masta Kink" and finding not some broken bodywork but dismembered arms and legs decorating the road was an acceptable state of affairs. But some of the worst incidents were just sheer stupidity. One of the saddest things I've ever seen, and certainly among the hardest to watch, is the footage from the 1973 Dutch Grand Prix, of Roger Williamson trapped upside down in his burning car, with David Purley getting out of his car and running across the track to save his friend. The marshals have no flame-retardant clothing and only one fire extinguisher, so they can't go close to the car and he is trying to turn it over, trying to put the fire out, trying to save the day with this woefully inadequate equipment while the marshals can only watch on helpless until the situation becomes hopeless and they have to lead Purley away to stop him from risking his own life. You know what the race organisers did? They continued under a local yellow flag, which meant the ambulance and fire engine couldn't get to the scene until far too late because there were still cars going at race pace. By the time they got there the car was a burnt out wreck and Williamson was long since asphyxiated. They flipped the car the right way up, rolled it out of the way, put a blanket over it and continued the race. With Williamson's corpse still in it.

Nowadays, that kind of level of organisatorial irresponsibility is almost impossible to fathom in any sport (and thankfully so). Even when the organisers tempt fate to the most ridiculous of levels (see Dan Wheldon's fateful accident, an enormous pileup at high speed which Dario Franchitti described as being "like driving through the opening scene of Terminator"). There is the occasional example in cycling of how completely brain-dead a race organiser can be; if you recall a few years ago the organisers of the Vuelta al País Vasco saw a terrible crash on stage 1 there, in Bilbao, where they held the same finish as had been used in the 2011 Vuelta, only they didn't have the same level of barriers and didn't realise until the day that with all the cars removed, there were vertical metal posts in the road, and their solution was to put traffic cones on top of them as if that would suddenly cause riders to not move around in the sprint. Sheer idiocy. Shornig up the structures with bricks goes in the same category - whilst it makes some logical sense, there's a good reason that solution is seldom used: because when it comes to a situation like a crash - which is hardly a rarity - it takes an already dangerous situation and makes it worse.

When it comes to Groenewegen, you know, these things often police themselves in the long run. He's going to feel terrible about it, and obviously there are some elements of judging the outcome rather than the incident. People were wary of Cavendish for a long time after his string of 2010 crashes. Sagan's DQ in the Tour a few years ago was influenced by previous, which led to the perceived overreaction from the commissaires (notwithstanding that in both cases there was a contingent who seemed to go out of their way to find the offender blameless just because they liked them, the decision was controversial regardless - although one wonders if he would have received the same support, and the decision the same backlash, had Cavendish been as badly injured as Jakobsen has been here, though this move by Groenewegen at least feels somewhat worse). And then there are people like Romain Feillu, Nacer Bouhanni and Roberto Ferrari who get pigeonholed as dangerous sprinters, for whatever reason (for some it's numerous infractions, for others it's a single, but particularly egregious and high-profile, incident). Nobody will want to give Groenewegen their wheel, people will tread carefully around him, he will find himself boxed in and also particularly unpopular with the people that police the leadouts and throw their weight around when the camera isn't on them, like Mark Renshaw used to.

Is this particular incident as bad as the Theo Bos/Daryl Impey incident in Turkey? Groenewegen was no doubt reckless, and acting with no regard to the safety of himself or anybody around him... but simultaneously at least it was a racing incident. An incident that could have - should have - been avoided, but changing lanes in a sprint is not as immediately egregious as literally (actually using that correctly) wrestling a guy off their bike at 70km/h+. Hell, people like Djamolidine Abdoujaparov have become folk heroes for sprints of that kind. It doesn't usually matter to the commissaires if you change lanes if you're faster than anybody else - Cav never caused issues doing it until he had no form and he wasn't over a bike length faster than anybody else, for example - and so in general sprinting on the crab is never called out unless either an official protest is lodged or an incident occurs, which given the kind of speeds talked about in a sprint usually means high risk of injury. However as hrotha pointed out, the fact that this offence is practically never punished unless somebody gets hurt means that sprinters are willing to take their chances, because they won't get punished unless the other guy fails to back down, or they lose control, and here you had multiple things go wrong in those respects, combined with an irresponsible decision by the race organiser, that exacerbated the problem. You can punish Groenewegen for irregular sprinting - indeed he has been - and you can perhaps punish him further for repeat offending if that is an issue (I don't feel that they can do that unless they've actually punished him before, though; if he's been sprinting on the crab a lot but this is the first time he's been called on it, then he would be within his right to argue that it is unfair to punish him as a repeat offender for something he would have felt was considered acceptable before because he wasn't being punished. But punishing based on outcome is fraught with issues because the race organisers are also to a large degree responsible for the grave outcome here, because while Groenewegen undoubtedly caused an avoidable crash, a dangerous run-in and the use of bricks by the organisers also carry a huge responsibility for the injuries sustained and those should not be pinned purely on Groenewegen's shoulders. País Vasco was put on final warning following the traffic cone incident and the UCI demanded better safety guarantees and standards in the wake of it. There's no way the same threat should not be directed at Czesław Lang and his team here.
 
There have been a good few crashes that can be used as precedents here, the problem is that it borrows elements from all of them.

Some people may withdraw, but most won't. Maybe Fabio's teammates will feel uncomfortable with it. I remember stories of Fabian Wegmann (at least I believe it was him) shacking down on the floor of another room because he was rooming with Wouter Weylandt in the 2011 Giro and didn't want to be alone the night before the parade stage. Matteo Pelucchi left the sport for months to practically live at the hospital while his fiancée recovered from her career-ending injury that left her paralysed from the waist down. These things can affect people. But at the same time, the péloton raced on in the 2011 Tour de Suisse when Juan Mauricio Soler was facing potential brain surgery; they raced on in San Luís after Malori's horrific injury. It's a strange sport like that. It's one of the most respectful, and simultaneously one of the strangest in its reactions to the hazards of the road. The péloton unites when one of its number falls; we've seen a few heart-breaking parades in our time, and there are things that I remember vividly about the way the sport honours its fallen. Tomasz Marczynski pinning Lambrecht's race number to his heart, Leopard Trek letting Tyler Farrar join the parade as they crossed the line, Lance Armstrong's finest career moment, winning a 1995 Tour stage and pointing to the heavens for Fabio Casartelli. To this day I will always have a soft spot for Vasil Kiryienka regardless of years as part of the race-stifling apparatus at Sky, because of his 2011 Giro stage win honouring Xavi Tondó - but simultaneously I still resent that his pride meant he put his sunglasses on at the line so the photos wouldn't show his tears.

It's a strange paradox of a sport. It will go to these lengths to honour its fallen comrades, and yet, a day of mourning is taken, and then it's back to business, save for the occasional sop to safety like the cancellation of Monte Crostis in 2011 after some misleading photographs and with an understandably nervy péloton made it perceived to be necessary. It's almost like it's Formula 1 in the 1960s, when Jackie Stewart was being mocked and laughed at as a coward for wanting to improve safety, because it "wouldn't be racing" if it were neutered for safety, as if Stirling Moss being told by his co-driver at a driver change in the 24h Spa to "watch out for body parts at the Masta Kink" and finding not some broken bodywork but dismembered arms and legs decorating the road was an acceptable state of affairs. But some of the worst incidents were just sheer stupidity. One of the saddest things I've ever seen, and certainly among the hardest to watch, is the footage from the 1973 Dutch Grand Prix, of Roger Williamson trapped upside down in his burning car, with David Purley getting out of his car and running across the track to save his friend. The marshals have no flame-retardant clothing and only one fire extinguisher, so they can't go close to the car and he is trying to turn it over, trying to put the fire out, trying to save the day with this woefully inadequate equipment while the marshals can only watch on helpless until the situation becomes hopeless and they have to lead Purley away to stop him from risking his own life. You know what the race organisers did? They continued under a local yellow flag, which meant the ambulance and fire engine couldn't get to the scene until far too late because there were still cars going at race pace. By the time they got there the car was a burnt out wreck and Williamson was long since asphyxiated. They flipped the car the right way up, rolled it out of the way, put a blanket over it and continued the race. With Williamson's corpse still in it.

Nowadays, that kind of level of organisatorial irresponsibility is almost impossible to fathom in any sport (and thankfully so). Even when the organisers tempt fate to the most ridiculous of levels (see Dan Wheldon's fateful accident, an enormous pileup at high speed which Dario Franchitti described as being "like driving through the opening scene of Terminator"). There is the occasional example in cycling of how completely brain-dead a race organiser can be; if you recall a few years ago the organisers of the Vuelta al País Vasco saw a terrible crash on stage 1 there, in Bilbao, where they held the same finish as had been used in the 2011 Vuelta, only they didn't have the same level of barriers and didn't realise until the day that with all the cars removed, there were vertical metal posts in the road, and their solution was to put traffic cones on top of them as if that would suddenly cause riders to not move around in the sprint. Sheer idiocy. Shornig up the structures with bricks goes in the same category - whilst it makes some logical sense, there's a good reason that solution is seldom used: because when it comes to a situation like a crash - which is hardly a rarity - it takes an already dangerous situation and makes it worse.

When it comes to Groenewegen, you know, these things often police themselves in the long run. He's going to feel terrible about it, and obviously there are some elements of judging the outcome rather than the incident. People were wary of Cavendish for a long time after his string of 2010 crashes. Sagan's DQ in the Tour a few years ago was influenced by previous, which led to the perceived overreaction from the commissaires (notwithstanding that in both cases there was a contingent who seemed to go out of their way to find the offender blameless just because they liked them, the decision was controversial regardless - although one wonders if he would have received the same support, and the decision the same backlash, had Cavendish been as badly injured as Jakobsen has been here, though this move by Groenewegen at least feels somewhat worse). And then there are people like Romain Feillu, Nacer Bouhanni and Roberto Ferrari who get pigeonholed as dangerous sprinters, for whatever reason (for some it's numerous infractions, for others it's a single, but particularly egregious and high-profile, incident). Nobody will want to give Groenewegen their wheel, people will tread carefully around him, he will find himself boxed in and also particularly unpopular with the people that police the leadouts and throw their weight around when the camera isn't on them, like Mark Renshaw used to.

Is this particular incident as bad as the Theo Bos/Daryl Impey incident in Turkey? Groenewegen was no doubt reckless, and acting with no regard to the safety of himself or anybody around him... but simultaneously at least it was a racing incident. An incident that could have - should have - been avoided, but changing lanes in a sprint is not as immediately egregious as literally (actually using that correctly) wrestling a guy off their bike at 70km/h+. Hell, people like Djamolidine Abdoujaparov have become folk heroes for sprints of that kind. It doesn't usually matter to the commissaires if you change lanes if you're faster than anybody else - Cav never caused issues doing it until he had no form and he wasn't over a bike length faster than anybody else, for example - and so in general sprinting on the crab is never called out unless either an official protest is lodged or an incident occurs, which given the kind of speeds talked about in a sprint usually means high risk of injury. However as hrotha pointed out, the fact that this offence is practically never punished unless somebody gets hurt means that sprinters are willing to take their chances, because they won't get punished unless the other guy fails to back down, or they lose control, and here you had multiple things go wrong in those respects, combined with an irresponsible decision by the race organiser, that exacerbated the problem. You can punish Groenewegen for irregular sprinting - indeed he has been - and you can perhaps punish him further for repeat offending if that is an issue (I don't feel that they can do that unless they've actually punished him before, though; if he's been sprinting on the crab a lot but this is the first time he's been called on it, then he would be within his right to argue that it is unfair to punish him as a repeat offender for something he would have felt was considered acceptable before because he wasn't being punished. But punishing based on outcome is fraught with issues because the race organisers are also to a large degree responsible for the grave outcome here, because while Groenewegen undoubtedly caused an avoidable crash, a dangerous run-in and the use of bricks by the organisers also carry a huge responsibility for the injuries sustained and those should not be pinned purely on Groenewegen's shoulders. País Vasco was put on final warning following the traffic cone incident and the UCI demanded better safety guarantees and standards in the wake of it. There's no way the same threat should not be directed at Czesław Lang and his team here.
Thank you for this post. Sums up how I feel about the incident and adds all the context I'd never be able to provide.

I just came back home and I'm happy to read Jacobsen is alive and fighting for his recovery.
 
It does provide the huge problem, that they do it cause they get away with it when nothing happens.

I don't think the solution is to not penalize when it does go horribly wrong.

Endangering the lives of fellow athletes should warrant a lot more than disqualification.
 
It does provide the huge problem, that they do it cause they get away with it when nothing happens.

I don't think the solution is to not penalize when it does go horribly wrong.

Endangering the lives of fellow athletes should warrant a lot more than disqualification.
Exactly. UCI/Organisers should be way stricter if riders do dangerous stuff like this in sprints whether or not a crash happens.
 
I am aware we should first and foremost focus on and pray for a full and swift recovery for Fabio. And believe me I am horrified and I've said some prayers for him. But can we please also have a poll for what sanctions need to be issued against DG? DQ from the race already happened.., but ban for 2020 season or some other form of appropriate punishment? This cannot and must not ever happen again.. Do not get me wrong I am not out for blood or defamation but I just think this sprint behaviour is intolerable especially as it's clearly not accidental. If consensus is that a poll is inappropriate or inciting hatred I can totally accept that but I am just curious what this forum thinks.
Sprinters seem to sense when to pinch another rider automatically. It's gone on forever and riders get sanctioned, fined, etc. They sign up for it and understand those risks. What they don't sign up for is the stone age "safety" provisions at the finish zone. That's where the UCI needs to pay up; they approved the course.
 
There have been a good few crashes that can be used as precedents here, the problem is that it borrows elements from all of them.

Some people may withdraw, but most won't. Maybe Fabio's teammates will feel uncomfortable with it. I remember stories of Fabian Wegmann (at least I believe it was him) shacking down on the floor of another room because he was rooming with Wouter Weylandt in the 2011 Giro and didn't want to be alone the night before the parade stage. Matteo Pelucchi left the sport for months to practically live at the hospital while his fiancée recovered from her career-ending injury that left her paralysed from the waist down. These things can affect people. But at the same time, the péloton raced on in the 2011 Tour de Suisse when Juan Mauricio Soler was facing potential brain surgery; they raced on in San Luís after Malori's horrific injury. It's a strange sport like that. It's one of the most respectful, and simultaneously one of the strangest in its reactions to the hazards of the road. The péloton unites when one of its number falls; we've seen a few heart-breaking parades in our time, and there are things that I remember vividly about the way the sport honours its fallen. Tomasz Marczynski pinning Lambrecht's race number to his heart, Leopard Trek letting Tyler Farrar join the parade as they crossed the line, Lance Armstrong's finest career moment, winning a 1995 Tour stage and pointing to the heavens for Fabio Casartelli. To this day I will always have a soft spot for Vasil Kiryienka regardless of years as part of the race-stifling apparatus at Sky, because of his 2011 Giro stage win honouring Xavi Tondó - but simultaneously I still resent that his pride meant he put his sunglasses on at the line so the photos wouldn't show his tears.

It's a strange paradox of a sport. It will go to these lengths to honour its fallen comrades, and yet, a day of mourning is taken, and then it's back to business, save for the occasional sop to safety like the cancellation of Monte Crostis in 2011 after some misleading photographs and with an understandably nervy péloton made it perceived to be necessary. It's almost like it's Formula 1 in the 1960s, when Jackie Stewart was being mocked and laughed at as a coward for wanting to improve safety, because it "wouldn't be racing" if it were neutered for safety, as if Stirling Moss being told by his co-driver at a driver change in the 24h Spa to "watch out for body parts at the Masta Kink" and finding not some broken bodywork but dismembered arms and legs decorating the road was an acceptable state of affairs. But some of the worst incidents were just sheer stupidity. One of the saddest things I've ever seen, and certainly among the hardest to watch, is the footage from the 1973 Dutch Grand Prix, of Roger Williamson trapped upside down in his burning car, with David Purley getting out of his car and running across the track to save his friend. The marshals have no flame-retardant clothing and only one fire extinguisher, so they can't go close to the car and he is trying to turn it over, trying to put the fire out, trying to save the day with this woefully inadequate equipment while the marshals can only watch on helpless until the situation becomes hopeless and they have to lead Purley away to stop him from risking his own life. You know what the race organisers did? They continued under a local yellow flag, which meant the ambulance and fire engine couldn't get to the scene until far too late because there were still cars going at race pace. By the time they got there the car was a burnt out wreck and Williamson was long since asphyxiated. They flipped the car the right way up, rolled it out of the way, put a blanket over it and continued the race. With Williamson's corpse still in it.

Nowadays, that kind of level of organisatorial irresponsibility is almost impossible to fathom in any sport (and thankfully so). Even when the organisers tempt fate to the most ridiculous of levels (see Dan Wheldon's fateful accident, an enormous pileup at high speed which Dario Franchitti described as being "like driving through the opening scene of Terminator"). There is the occasional example in cycling of how completely brain-dead a race organiser can be; if you recall a few years ago the organisers of the Vuelta al País Vasco saw a terrible crash on stage 1 there, in Bilbao, where they held the same finish as had been used in the 2011 Vuelta, only they didn't have the same level of barriers and didn't realise until the day that with all the cars removed, there were vertical metal posts in the road, and their solution was to put traffic cones on top of them as if that would suddenly cause riders to not move around in the sprint. Sheer idiocy. Shornig up the structures with bricks goes in the same category - whilst it makes some logical sense, there's a good reason that solution is seldom used: because when it comes to a situation like a crash - which is hardly a rarity - it takes an already dangerous situation and makes it worse.

When it comes to Groenewegen, you know, these things often police themselves in the long run. He's going to feel terrible about it, and obviously there are some elements of judging the outcome rather than the incident. People were wary of Cavendish for a long time after his string of 2010 crashes. Sagan's DQ in the Tour a few years ago was influenced by previous, which led to the perceived overreaction from the commissaires (notwithstanding that in both cases there was a contingent who seemed to go out of their way to find the offender blameless just because they liked them, the decision was controversial regardless - although one wonders if he would have received the same support, and the decision the same backlash, had Cavendish been as badly injured as Jakobsen has been here, though this move by Groenewegen at least feels somewhat worse). And then there are people like Romain Feillu, Nacer Bouhanni and Roberto Ferrari who get pigeonholed as dangerous sprinters, for whatever reason (for some it's numerous infractions, for others it's a single, but particularly egregious and high-profile, incident). Nobody will want to give Groenewegen their wheel, people will tread carefully around him, he will find himself boxed in and also particularly unpopular with the people that police the leadouts and throw their weight around when the camera isn't on them, like Mark Renshaw used to.

Is this particular incident as bad as the Theo Bos/Daryl Impey incident in Turkey? Groenewegen was no doubt reckless, and acting with no regard to the safety of himself or anybody around him... but simultaneously at least it was a racing incident. An incident that could have - should have - been avoided, but changing lanes in a sprint is not as immediately egregious as literally (actually using that correctly) wrestling a guy off their bike at 70km/h+. Hell, people like Djamolidine Abdoujaparov have become folk heroes for sprints of that kind. It doesn't usually matter to the commissaires if you change lanes if you're faster than anybody else - Cav never caused issues doing it until he had no form and he wasn't over a bike length faster than anybody else, for example - and so in general sprinting on the crab is never called out unless either an official protest is lodged or an incident occurs, which given the kind of speeds talked about in a sprint usually means high risk of injury. However as hrotha pointed out, the fact that this offence is practically never punished unless somebody gets hurt means that sprinters are willing to take their chances, because they won't get punished unless the other guy fails to back down, or they lose control, and here you had multiple things go wrong in those respects, combined with an irresponsible decision by the race organiser, that exacerbated the problem. You can punish Groenewegen for irregular sprinting - indeed he has been - and you can perhaps punish him further for repeat offending if that is an issue (I don't feel that they can do that unless they've actually punished him before, though; if he's been sprinting on the crab a lot but this is the first time he's been called on it, then he would be within his right to argue that it is unfair to punish him as a repeat offender for something he would have felt was considered acceptable before because he wasn't being punished. But punishing based on outcome is fraught with issues because the race organisers are also to a large degree responsible for the grave outcome here, because while Groenewegen undoubtedly caused an avoidable crash, a dangerous run-in and the use of bricks by the organisers also carry a huge responsibility for the injuries sustained and those should not be pinned purely on Groenewegen's shoulders. País Vasco was put on final warning following the traffic cone incident and the UCI demanded better safety guarantees and standards in the wake of it. There's no way the same threat should not be directed at Czesław Lang and his team here.

Sorry, but I don't care about parades or symbols. But reactions to something like this differ a lot in people. Personally I find it hypocrite to parade or do special celebrations while really not caring about anything but the own career. On an emotional level that always disgusts me. But I am old enough to have realized people just mourn and deal with things in different ways, that's my head, though, that tells me so.

So it looks like he might be okay in the end?
 
Let's hope for more encouraging news during the day! Stay strong Fabio, hopefully he'll make a full recovery!

I can't agree with those saying that only the actions of Groenewegen (which happen rather often in a sprint) should be punished instead of the consequences and that a simple DSQ or something like that should be enough.

Actions can have bad consequences and people are always punished accordingly even if you had no intentions for the bad consequences to happen or if it was just bad luck.

When you punch someone in the face in a bar fight (I guess this happens fairly often) and there are no consequences you'll likely get away with it with none or very light punishment. However if you punch someone in the face and he falls with his head on a cornerstone and dies, you will be charged with involuntary manslaughter and punished accordingly.

Same with being caught drink driving or killing someone drink driving like some have already pointed out.

Why should this be treated any differently? You should not and cannot deviate from your line in a sprint and you know this can have consequences. Just because it happens all the time without bad consequences doesn't mean you get a 'get out of jail free card'. I think Groenewegen should be punished for his actions taking into account the severe consequences as well. (While obviously the organisation and the UCI are to blame as well considering the dangerous finish and badly installed barriers)

Having said that I can imagine that Groenewegen is a mess right now and that he feels extremely guilty (at least he should be if he is a decent human being).

The Netherlands might just have lost two of their best word-class sprinters (at least for a long period of time).
 
I dunno if it would help if there was always some sort of punishment if a rider deviates from his line* during a sprint. Not necessarily downright disqualification, but simply demotion (there's another word, I forgot it...) to the last place in the group, or maybe even simply a loss of points for the point jersey, basically telling the rider that "We acknowledge your fifth place, but you're not getting any points." (And at least for sprinters a loss of points is actually a punishment that will be felt!)

*BTW, the no deviation from line rule doesn't count if you have to deviate from your line in order to get past a slower rider, right?

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Oh, and... surely they're not going to try an make Mezgec wear the jersey? I suppose it's a bit like the situation with T. Martin in the Tour a few years back, when even though he didn't start the stage - making Froome the default leader - he'd still made it across the line on the previous day, meaning that he did still technically have the jersey.
 
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Oh, and... surely they're not going to try an make Mezgec wear the jersey? I suppose it's a bit like the situation with T. Martin in the Tour a few years back, when even though he didn't start the stage - making Froome the default leader - he'd still made it across the line on the previous day, meaning that he did still technically have the jersey.
Malecki is 3rd in GC, not Mezgec. But yeah, probably not
 
That was a real mess.
Surely no one intends to hurt rivals, but deviation from the line is often done with an intention to discourage overtaking. Even if riders aren't directly taught the skill, situations make them develop the habit.
And that's what's wrong in sprinting. The practice of opportune interpretation of rules or fair play.
 

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