This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 142

How do you make cycling safer? It’s the recurring question of our times. A spate of high-profile crashes, some involving superstars like Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel, have happened in a period when Gino Mäder, Muriel Furrer and André Drege, among others, have tragically lost their lives in professional bike races.

Commissions and working groups dedicated to safety have been set up, but still accidents are happening, and lives are being put in danger. It has become a political football, a blame game that no one is protected from, but there is at least agreement that meaningful changes need to be implemented. The UCI, cycling’s world governing body, have been stopped in the courts from introducing gearing limits, and others have called for protective clothing and a complete redesign of what makes a safe course.

Adam Blythe, former pro and now commentator for Eurosport, spoke to Rouleur about what’s going wrong and what could be done to make the sport safer. As did Dan Bigham, a former Hour Record holder and now head of engineering at Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe; Bigham has become an outspoken critic of the UCI’s safety policies, but he believes obstacles to change are not insurmountable.

“Things will change, but if we want a safer sport things will need to be different. But that’s probably a fair price to pay for having a sport that people don’t die in,” Bigham says. “We’ve already had deaths, we nearly had a major death at the Itzulia Basque Country [ Jonas Vingegaard in 2024], and if one of the superstars of the sport had died then we wouldn’t be having this conversation because it would have been forced upon the stakeholders of the sport to do something. It’s a terrible thing to say but maybe it will take that to tip us over the edge to get to where we need to get.”

Answers have been edited for clarity.

Dan, why have you become such a vocal campaigner on safety?

Bigham: As an engineer you think more about safety than anyone else in the sport. I’ve become a willing spokesperson for safety because so many people shy away from this topic, as it’s seen as a negative within the sport that you’re commenting on things that reflect badly on its image. But I think it’s good to address these things and to try and make the sport better and safer, because right now I would discourage my young child from entering the sport as it’s scary and dangerous. I hope I can be in a position to improve that, so in the future it’s not a worry and not a problem.

Read more: ‘We've had inexcusable deaths in our sport’ - Dan Bigham’s call for action to make cycling safer

Why is reducing speed, such as limiting gears, not the answer?

Blythe: It’s bollocks when people say speed makes racing more dangerous. Let the bike industry make the fastest and lightest bike possible. Why do the UCI have a limit on sock height and bike weight? As long as everyone can prove that it’s perfectly safe, why are you blocking the whole industry? “Let’s make bike riding slower so everyone can enjoy it more,” they say. No. You buy a Ferrari to drive faster.

Bigham: Let’s look at F1. All studies in motorsport have shown that speed is not a major factor in accidents. Yes, it is a factor, and higher speed means more kinetic energy to get rid of, and therefore it’s harder to slow down. But the primary cause is not the speed that makes you crash – it’s something else that causes you to crash. And then speed is the problem that you have to mitigate and reduce. It’s a competitive sport, we’re trying to get faster. You can try to limit speed but it won’t address the root cause. It wasn’t that when we were riding at 40kph there were zero crashes and then now at 45kph there are loads. Yes, there’s a correlation, but correlation is not the causation. I can sleep at night very comfortably knowing that speed is not the main cause. The data supports the fact that the main cause of crashes is road infrastructure and things you’re hitting, so make that safer and we’re in a much better place.

How do parcours contribute to the problem?

Blythe: Things have gotten a helluva lot faster and it’s more dangerous in terms of the routes and the speed they go downhill. The UCI and route organisers have to look at where they put key points in a route to make it as safe a passage as possible. We see big fights for position at 120km to go because everyone’s worried about the split coming out of it. Let’s work back to make things easier: if there’s going to be crosswinds left after the climb with 150km to go, should we send them right instead so that it’s not as bunched up? Sometimes instead of taking a race around a town, they take it through the centre where there are speed bumps, road furniture, and it adds danger. It takes time, but we have to look at it in that way.

Blythe spoke at Rouleur Live 2025 (Image: Sean Hardy)

The UCI have stated that 35 per cent of crashes are caused as a result of rider error, and thus they cannot be absolved of blame. How much do you think riders are to blame?

Blythe: There are a million reasons why there are crashes, and bike riders being hungry is one of the main ones. A lot of crashes nowadays, especially when in a grouped-up situation, are simply from a lack of respect, riders pushing and fighting, as that’s what’s getting driven into them in their ear. From a pure bike rider’s point of view, that inch matters; you fight for what is in front of you. But riders have to learn the process of how to tackle these scenarios in a safe way.

Bigham: A percentage of crashes come from rider behaviour and there is a case for that, but we should address the bigger things first. Should it not be on the regulators to create the environment that when crashes and mistakes happen, the riders are not as heavily punished? We need to look at the infrastructure, and put the pressure back onto the regulators to create an environment that is safe for racing. That’s what F1 did: they accepted that racers will go for a gap, but then adapted so that when they do crash, there’s enough of a run-off and enough impact structure. It’s the same thing here: we have to accept that riders are going to be competitive.

Is there a shortage of skills in the peloton?

Blythe: I started racing at a later age, but I grew up playing out on my bike, learning my bike craft from five to 16, going over jumps and bumps in the woods. Kids don’t do that anymore unless they pay to go to a BMX track, so that bike handling aspect of it is long forgotten. Cycling is much more numbers driven these days: you can look at a rider, see they’ve got amazing numbers, but you need to ask their history. Imagine they’re a horse: they’ve got their blinkers on, because they’ve only had to ride in a scenario where they’ve tried their hardest, put out amazingly high numbers, but they’ve barely ridden in the peloton and need to adjust to that. It’s really difficult to teach someone after the age of 19 how to handle a bike properly.

Bigham: I agree and it’s generally accepted that we need to improve bike handling. The reason it’s not the best is because there’s a lack of respect and it’s a race to the bottom as everyone wants to achieve that next big performance. We should ask riders to be a bit more sensible and teams should take some collective responsibility to coach them and make them better. But the UCI can’t wash their hands of this and say it’s not their problem because absolutely it is their problem to create safe environments for riders to do their job in.

Should riders be more vocal in demanding change?

Blythe: It’s really difficult because when Tadej Pogačar is winning everything, he doesn’t want to be the person to say ‘let’s change this’, because then everyone is looking at him and saying he wants to change it for his benefit. If it’s too cold, wet or windy, you can have 70 per cent of the peloton stand up and say they’re not racing, but if Tadej says he wants to race then the race is on, no questions about it. So it doesn’t take one or ten riders, but a whole peloton to stand together as one and that’s difficult, because each person’s strength is also their biggest weakness. If I said something when I was racing people would have said, ‘Well, he’s not winning, so of course he’s got an excuse or a problem’. Being a spokesperson is challenging, especially for those not in the top-30 status-wise.

Bigham: They have their rider unions but I don’t think they engage that well with them. They’re also worried that if they speak after a stage other journalists will ask them a question and they don’t want to say something that affects their form, their contract, or their job. They want to help the sport, but not at their expense.

Bigham has been working at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe for over a year (Image: Red Bull)

Picnic PostNL have recently revealed a kit that includes an inflatable airbag. Should these be introduced to racing?

Bigham: I’m not going to advocate against it because I think more protection is not a bad thing, but it’s not a preventive measure so therefore not a first order thing to address. Stop the crash from happening first, then afterwards mitigate the effects of it happening, which might be safer helmets or more protective layers. It will help you but it ain’t going to save you from death or a life-threatening crash, so do it, but don’t think that’s the solution because it’s not.

Blythe: Protective clothing is a very good idea and if it’s made super aero then great. But riders want to ride in the fastest clothing, not protective clothing. They’re not willing to gamble away getting a breakaway over wearing protective clothing that might help them if they crash. The other thing is protective clothing will stop you getting bumps and grazes, which is a good thing in stage races especially, but no-one to my knowledge – unless it’s their hands or head – has never not started the next day because of grazes and scratches. Protecting clothing won’t protect broken or dislocated bones.

How do you rate the work of the SafeR project and the UCI’s safety database?

Bigham: SafeR is not independent enough and nowhere near transparent enough. A good example is that there were no Sram teams involved in SafeR at first and that was a problem when the UCI tried to limit gear ratios. We also need a safety database that is fit for purpose. The people who run it are candid about its flaws: it doesn’t tell you what the rider was doing before the crash, nor what speed they and other riders were at. What they do is look at a video of a crash, someone types up what happened, but there’s no follow-up, such as if the rider finished, or if they were injured for a week or a year. I want to give our GPS data to explain what happened before, but they don’t want it. Why, if I am trying to get involved in helping, do I get stonewalled every single step of the way? The only way to objectively get better is to look at the data. If the data isn’t good enough then it’s on the teams to supply that data, but to this point they’ve not been willing to accept that.

What would you recommend the UCI implement immediately?

Bigham: We need a proper data driven approach to safety and to do proper root cause analysis. What is causing the crashes, especially the most severe ones, and how do you address that? We can’t just be messing about at the edge because that helps nobody. It distracts, and it crowds out genuine discussion about genuine issues. We also need rapid medical response. It took an hour for someone to attend to Muriel Furrer at the World Championships in 2024. That’s shit. Not good enough. If we can tick all of these boxes off and do things right then the sport will be in a better place.