Benson Bulletin: Giro d'Italia stage 1 🇮🇹
The normalisation around awful crashes, in-depth sprint analysis, and Visma take a page out of the Pantani playbook
Hey Subscribers,
Well, that escalated quickly. Stage 1 of the Giro d’Italia from Nessebar to Burgas was destined to end in a sprint, and while the opening 135km or so had little drama to speak of, the final exploded into life with teams chasing a win and the first maglia rosa of this year’s race.
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We saw a landmark victory for young Paul Magnier (Soudal Quick-Step) while a huge crash inside the final 600m took down several riders. Today, we analyse the finish in full, including what was an avoidable crash, Soudal Quick-Step’s perfect lead-out and sprint, Jonathan Milan missing out, Ethan Vernon coming close, and Jonas Vingegaard’s approach to keeping safe the Marco Pantani way.
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Daniel 🫶
The normalisation of crashes and questionable courses
Stage 1 of the Giro d’Italia was destined to come down to a bunch sprint, with the likes of Jonathan Milan and Paul Magnier among the favourites for the maglia rosa. There is nothing wrong, per se, with having a bunch sprint to open a Grand Tour, but if course designers are going to insist on such scenarios, then a greater degree of common sense needs to be employed.
Everyone knew the road narrowed heading into the final 1,000m, with the peloton moving from a wide-open boulevard to a slimmer street that was one or two car widths wide. Granted, there was a shallow incline leading into this section, but at 60-70kph, with a fight for position underway, the speed would barely have dropped.
Then, when the road narrowed, the barriers on either side had feet sticking out, making it even narrower by about a bike length and adding another obstacle for the peloton. It was so predictable that we’d have a crash, and sure enough, a rider hit the foot of one of the barriers and was thrown back into the peloton.
Erlend Blikra (Uno-X Mobility) was the first faller, although he should undoubtedly take none of the blame, and from there Kaden Groves somersaulted into the metal barriers, Dylan Groenewegen came down with a wrist injury that could be massively problematic for the rest of his race, and several other riders were forced to pick themselves up with absent skin, broken bikes and stage dreams tarnished.
Crashes can happen at any point in a race. They are sadly inevitable in cycling, but the level of responsibility needs to be increased when you’re intent on having 184 fresh riders vying for position on a road that a team bus would have to take with a degree of caution.
It frustrates me that we hear from certain circles that riders are responsible for the vast number of crashes, yet this incident could have been dodged by installing better barriers, or, better still, adjusting the course away from such a critical pinch point.
There’s also a normalisation of these situations. We only seem to judge crashes by their end result, but the fact that everyone got up from this one doesn’t make it any more acceptable.
And teams should be furious about this, too. They expect their riders to go into battle day after day and put their bodies on the line, and they invest huge sums of money in recruitment, training, equipment - all with the aim of delivering value for sponsors. What value is there in seeing your best riders hit the tarmac on the first day of the Grand Tour? If this were a relegation year or a team that was desperate for a sponsor, then the effects could be devastating, but instead, there’s so little pushback, and as a result, we have one of the most predictable yet potentially avoidable crashes we’ve seen in a long time.
Riders do have a responsibility in this, too. At the finish, there were reports of riders using elbows in the buildup to the crash, and that obviously doesn’t help safety or their cause, but if you wind back to the start of the race, that pinch point in the road was a recipe for disaster.