Falls are an integral part of cycling and we realize it even better after the first week of racing, where few steps ended without runners being projected on the ground. The fall and abandonment of Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-deceuninck) during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France This is certainly one of the revealing. Many actors in the world of cycling have taken up and proposed solutions to fight against this scourge, whether they are runners such as Michael Woods (Israel-Prime Tech) or other personalities such as Patrick Lefeverethe former boss of the Soudal-Quick Step. It is now the turn of the director of training Visma | Lease a Bike, Richard plug to express themselves on this subject, directly pointing to ASO's communication, the organizer of Tour de France.
Video – Jonas Vingegaard has passed through the Falls on the Tour
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“We do not celebrate by showing the falls …”
Richard plug has thus denounced the highlighting of falls in the contents around the Tour de Francewhether it is promotional videos or the recent Netflix series, Tour de France Unchained: “We do not celebrate cycling by showing accidents. We celebrate cycling by showing the sprint between the older ones on the Brittany Wall and other sprints, not the falls. I said it in Aso, but they include images of falls in their promotional videos for the Tour de France. If I was an organizer, I would be ashamed of having accidents during my race; I would hide them almost. We should be ashamed to show our accidents to the whole world, because it is not good. ”
With the creation of Safer to dissect the problem and find solutions, Richard plug also highlighted the influence of the route and roads taken by the race: “29 % of the falls are due to the behavior of the runner, but the remaining 71 % can be divided into several parts. If we consider the situation, we can bring everything to the circumstances of the race, for example the route, such as steep descents or donkey backs. The easiest solutions are the routes and the environment of the race. The organizers should do better, avoiding installing slowers 150 meters before the finish line, example”. So, Richard plugwhich is very invested in the functioning of Safer, rejects the idea a speed restriction test during the Guangxi round in China, preferring to modify the routes.
