Visma-Lease a Bike CEO Richard Plugge has criticised what he describes as the “lack of anger” among cycling’s stakeholders in response to Finlay Tarling’s death, arguing that too many compromises are being made when it comes to race safety.
Plugge also suggested that local circuits, like those seen at world and national championships, could become standard in the future, as 200km A to B race routes become too difficult to marshal properly and ensure the safety of the peloton.
The Visma general manager’s comments come just over a week after the death of Fin Tarling, the 19-year-old British NSN development rider, who was killed during the eighth stage of the Volta a Portugal in a high-speed, head-on collision with a member of the public who drove his van onto the course, travelling in the opposite direction to the peloton.
Speaking to Wielerflits at the Vuelta a España, Plugge argued that the response to Tarling’s death – caused by a motorist who was able to drive onto the course from an unmanned junction – has been too muted, claiming that the cycling world is unwilling to fully face up to its own safety failures.
“This simply cannot happen! The entire cycling world needs to be aware of that,” he said. “We are just carrying on.
“What disappoints me enormously is that everyone says it is terrible, but then immediately a ‘but’ follows. I would say we need to skip everything after the ‘but’. This simply cannot happen. That is the attitude we must adopt as the cycling community.”
He continued: “This boy encounters a car on a descent. Can you imagine this happening during Formula 1 in Zandvoort? That a car is suddenly driving on the track in the opposite direction?
“Of course, everyone says that this doesn’t happen at Zandvoort. But this actually does happen in a cycling race.”
Plugge, who took over the Dutch Visma-Lease a Bike team in 2012, is also the former head of the AIGCP, a union representing professional cycling teams, and has been a public face of the Saudi Arabian-funded One Cycling proposal that seeks to reshape and organise the professional cycling calendar.
In the interview, he also questioned the current influence of SafeR, the safety initiative established by the UCI in the wake of Gino Mader’s death at the 2023 Tour de Suisse.
“What surprises me is that neither UCI President David Lappartient nor anyone else from the umbrella organisations stands up and says: ‘Yes, but wait a minute, we really need to get together now and think about how we are going to prevent this from happening in the future?’,” he said.
“We had a fantastic initiative with SafeR, but I don’t hear much about that anymore either. Maybe we as teams need to take responsibility for safety in races ourselves again. I don’t know, but the lack of anger about what has happened again is very disappointing to me.
“I have said it before: SafeR has become a political construct where compromises are made simply to keep the church in the middle [a Dutch idiom meaning to maintain the status quo]. But it is about ensuring that riders can do their job safely.
“It is about safety. It is about ensuring that you can do your job safely. And that is uncompromising! It is either safe, or it is not safe. We provided a fantastic starting point for this when SafeR was founded, but it is no longer being acted upon. It has since become a completely different construct.”
According to Plugge, the answer may lie in completely overhauling how races are organised, including scrapping the traditional A to B route in favour of localised circuits.
“We have already indicated to the authorities, organisers, and teams, if cycling from A to B over public roads over 200 kilometres is no longer feasible, then we must ride laps of 15, 20, or 25 kilometres,” he said.
“Provided those routes can be secured one hundred percent. Ultimately, it is simply about our riders. They must be certain that they can race on a safe course.
“We are standing here at the start of the Vuelta a España in Monaco. The area around Nice and Monaco is full of traffic. We need to think now about how we can still organise a cycling race here in five years. What will our sport look like in five years?
“Will we still be able to ride 200 kilometres from A to B? Probably not, because then you would need a thousand traffic marshals. Whereas, if you ride laps of 20 kilometres… Everyone is super enthusiastic about the world championships being held on a local circuit. And rightly so! Because that is at least manageable.”
Plugge’s remarks come after his fellow team manager, EF Education-EasyPost boss Jonathan Vaughters also criticised the UCI’s focus on “ridiculous little” measures while failing to ensure safety at races.
“What I’m really not enjoying is this sentiment that’s coming from very powerful people in cycling, that says: ‘What can you do? Sometimes cars just end up on the road, this is just part of doing competitive sport on the open road’. That is not true. This is preventable,” Vaughters told the BBC.
“People look at the Tour de France and see a bunch of riders going through the beautiful French countryside, but fundamentally it’s a very dangerous sport. From the start of my career I can’t tell you how many people we’ve lost.
“I’m tired of the governance in charge of this sport introducing changes around ridiculous little issues, when they prove themselves to be unable to govern a sport to keep traffic off the road.”
