Ex-pro points the finger at riders after Giro's mass crashes: 'What can the organisation do?'

The mass crashes in the Bulgarian opening weekend of the Giro d'Italia sparked intense debate in and around the peloton. Some blamed the race organisation; others pointed squarely at the riders themselves. Dutch former professional cyclist and podcaster Laurens ten Dam made his position crystal clear on the Live Slow Ride Fast podcast: he firmly belongs to the second camp.

Where NOS analysts Tom Dumoulin and Johan Bruyneel pointed to how race routes are structured in opening weekends, arguing that too much pressure is concentrated into a handful of moments in each stage,Ten Dam sees it differently. He places the blame for the stage two crash firmly at the riders' own feet.

"You can always blame the organisation, but it's simply the riders themselves. What can an organisation do about the fact that it's raining and the roads are slippery?" he asked on the podcast. In his view, the peloton as a whole needs to take collective responsibility for how it approaches a treacherous descent.

"There is so much pressure from the teams to be at the front. Everyone just rides as hard as possible to get there, and then waits for someone to go down. It's almost kamikaze. You can see that the riders who crash aren't even angry about it," he said, visibly baffled. "Then they all blame the organisation — but surely someone needs to stand up and say: 'Guys, this is madness.'"

What particularly troubled Ten Dam is how normalised the carnage has become. "They all go over the edge together and they know full well that people are going to get hurt — and yet they keep on doing it." This recklessness, he believes, is a relatively recent development in the peloton's culture.

"In the past, the top riders would lead the peloton into a descent, and the rest had the confidence that everyone would be brought back together at the bottom — but that trust has been broken time and again now," he explained. "Everyone wants to be at the front no matter the cost, even when they know full well that in ten kilometres there's a descent coming and they're going to get hammered. It's a given."

Yet Ten Dam does not only point the finger at the riders themselves. "It's also on the sports directors. You could get all the directeurs sportifs in a room and agree on what you're going to do when conditions become dangerous. You designate your team leader and one domestique — and suddenly you've got a neat, orderly forty riders in the front rows."

One can only hope that the sports directors heeded that advice during the rest day, and that the Giro's remaining stages pass without a repeat of the carnage seen in Bulgaria.