If safety was really the priority of racing, we’d be doing it online

Safety in races has been a constant theme for the last few seasons, and rightly so. Every time I hear it mentioned I find it hard not to think about the sheer recklessness of the whole idea of bike racing.

“Let’s take 200 people on highly unstable machines and pack them in tight so that if anyone bumps into someone else, they all fall over. Let’s dress them in the least protective Lycra suits we can make. Let’s ensure the speeds are high. Let’s do it all on the open road, with road furniture, unpredictable surfaces and random corners. Let’s throw in lots of support vehicles so that even if the bike monkeys manage to stay upright on their own, we can still knock them over.”

Michael Hutchinson

Multiple national champion on the bike and award-winning author Michael Hutchinson writes for CW every week

You could not invent road racing today. You’d never get it past a risk assessment. You’d never get it past any sort of common sense that exists this side of a Jackass movie.

The fact that anyone at all survives it is testament to the practice and skill of the riders and everyone around a race, and to cycling’s unique combination of competition and cooperation that means you can (most of the time) trust your competitors to also keep you safe. (Although,if you were dropped into the middle of a WorldTour peloton, the initial impression would be of people trying to kill you.)

The truth is that if safety was really the first priority of racing, we’d be doing all of it online, where you can ride clean through the rider in front with no consequences at all. Any attempt to race something as unstable as a bike in the real world is always a compromise.

Some of the compromises have to do with tradition – Paris-Roubaix is continuing the story of a race that dates back to the century before last. We all like the idea that riders out there racing in whatever the real world throws at them is part of the sport. E-racing isn’t going to provide the spectacle of riders covered in a thick layer of mud.

And some compromises have very directly to do with the attraction of risk itself. Watching Tom Pidcock descending on a knife edge would raise a lot fewer goosebumps if he did it in a simulator.

It can be even more on-the-nose. I remember being part of a conversation with some fans and a couple of WorldTour riders that broached safety. “I’ll be honest,” said one fan. “I quite like crashes. I sometimes watch compilations of them on YouTube.”

“You like watching people get hurt?” asked a rider.

“Well, let’s just say getting hurt by an appropriate amount,” the fan quickly backtracked.

“How would you feel about me hurting you an appropriate amount?” asked the rider. (He was Italian – it had a nice Godfather vibe.)

But the fan was right. Some things we just accept. Collarbones – we don’t mind about those getting broken, and most riders even accept the risk as part of the job. Road rash – we make jokes about howling noises coming out of the shower on the bus.

But it’s impossible to contain the risk so that the outcome doesn’t overstep “appropriate”. You can’t engineer danger that carefully. We’ve seen too many recent examples of really bad outcomes from crashes. I don’t want to see cycling so sanitised that it may as well be happening online. But it’s going to take more than the suggestions of smaller gears and wider handlebars to sort out. It’s probably time to worry more about safety and a little less about tradition and vicarious adrenaline rushes.