Cofidis honors rider who died in 2003 as peloton passes scene of tragedy, but Coquard falls short in Tour Auvergne

Cofidis worked on Thursday, together with Visma | Lease a Bike and others, to help bring the fifth stage of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes down to a sprint. The French team had an extra source of motivation, as the riders passed the memorial to Andrei Kivilev, who died in 2003 after crashing at Paris-Nice, during the opening phase of the stage.

Kivilev crashed in the Race to the Sun on the Col de la Gachet, the climb on which Thursday’s fifth stage began. The death of the then 29-year-old Kazakh rider — winner of a stage in the Dauphiné in 2001, the same year he finished fourth in the Tour de France — ultimately led to the introduction of mandatory helmets throughout the peloton.

The crash happened while Kivilev was climbing, when he was adjusting his earpiece and did not have his hands on the handlebars. The rider fell on roads he knew well from training in France and later died in hospital.

Cofidis paid tribute to their rider on social media. “Today, the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes peloton passes over the Col de la Gachet, just a few meters from the Andrei Kivilev memorial. Andrei, you are always with us. Our thoughts today are with your loved ones,” the team wrote.

The team had a contender in Bryan Coquard, but in the end he could do no better than ninth place. “The plan was to get Bryan Coquard into the sprint. We knew it would be difficult, because the first part of the stage was ideal for breakaways. But eventually we saw that several teams were interested in a sprint,” sports director Bingen Fernandez explained.

“The team worked well, but we came up just short in the final meters. Bryan couldn’t sprint properly; he was a little boxed in. In the end, he couldn’t show his true potential. We finished ninth. Like all riders, we always want to perform better. But that is sprinting,” the Spaniard said after watching Wout van Aert take the victory

Author: David Bavin-Hobbs - [email protected]