'What a sh*t sport' — Tom Dumoulin reflects on Giro carnage in Bulgaria and asks: how do we fix it?

The Giro d'Italia has arrived in Italy after three chaotic stages in Bulgaria more than left their mark. The crashes were frequent, and the brutal stage two incident will take a while to forget. What should we take from the Bulgarian opening weekend? Former professionals and NOS cycling analysts Tom Dumoulin and Stef Clement turned their attention to exactly that question on the Dutch-language NOS Wielerpodcast.

First, the racing itself — from which Dumoulin draws an immediate conclusion: "We're not much wiser." Well, apart from one thing: "Except that it won't be Yates," the former Giro winner said, referring to the UAE team leader's withdrawal from the race. "We haven't really had any demanding stages yet, apart from that second one — where the big crash happened. That was our first real moment of insight."

And in that moment, Dumoulin saw "a very good" Vingegaard. "And also a very good Van Eetvelt, and a good Pellizzari. The three of them eventually rode clear. But that effort was so short — it tells you nothing about where someone will be in the final week. Or well, not nothing, but very little. So much is still going to happen. The high mountains are a completely different proposition."

Yet it was the repeated, heavy crashes that overshadowed the opening weekend. How many times did Dumoulin find himself thinking: what a terrible sport this is? "Honestly, quite a few times. You catch yourself sitting there thinking: if I'm being honest, what a sh*t sport it can be sometimes. How much I love this sport, how much passion and devotion I have for it, and yet, what a sh*t sport. It's just so dangerous sometimes. That's the sad part."

And so Dumoulin found himself turning the question over. "You immediately start asking: what can we all do about this? How can we make the sport safer?" The answer? "I have to be honest — I come to the conclusion that I don't know either."

Protective clothing is sometimes raised as a possible solution in cycling. "But when you slide across wet tarmac at 60 km/h and hit a barrier... what do you do about that? There's no protection against that. You'd have to ride circles around an airfield, and none of us wants that either."

NOS colleague Clement, however, has an idea. He sees the root cause in how stages are structured. "I think we need to move away from these opening weekends where there is too little room to make real time differences. Once a general classification has begun to take shape, you do see that the peloton changes its behaviour."

Because: "Then far more riders let themselves drift back in the final kilometres. Right now it's just too congested, and the pace is simply too high. Whether that road on Friday had been as wide as an airfield or somewhat narrower — it wouldn't have mattered. It's the pressure from within the peloton that makes it dangerous," he said with conviction.