Trevor Ward

Crashes have come thick and fast this season. Should we be alarmed or is this propensity for falling over just the nature of our particular beast?

The much delayed and hastily rearranged pro season was notable for an unusually high number of crashes. Was it bad luck or were the riders risking everything to make their mark?

The shocking crashes that punctuated the 2020 pro cycling season remind me why I chose a desk job in a nice warm office rather than the career of bike racer. To paraphrase Woody Allen’s comments about his fear of flying, I’m not scared of riding a bike, I’m scared of crashing it and ending up bloodied and bruised in a tangle of metal and flesh. Racing looks just too damn dangerous.

Cycling at 50kmh shoulder-to-shoulder with 200 finely tuned athletes while wearing nothing more than a layer of Lycra and a polystyrene hat is not a scenario I wish to dwell on. Throw in the variables of erratic dogs, recalcitrant rain capes, bouncing bidons and misbehaving musettes and the chances of calamity increase considerably. Just ask Geraint Thomas, whose Giro hopes were dashed by a self-ejecting water bottle. And as for the idea of voluntarily putting myself in the middle of a bunch sprint? I’d rather take my chances slicing bacon on the edge of a cliff naked and blindfolded. Crashing hurts.

Referring to his spillage in the rain-soaked prologue of the 1995 Tour (which resulted in a broken leg, wrist and nose), Chris Boardman writes in his autobiography, ‘Crashes usually come in one of two flavours: “Oh shit, here it comes” or “Why am I in hospital?’’’

Thomas, meanwhile, who has won the

Tour, stage races and one-day Classics despite an unnerving penchant for smashing into telegraph poles and being blown into ditches, once described the sensation of crashing in the peloton as like driving along in a car at 30mph, opening the door and throwing yourself out.

These days, live TV and social media make riders’ suffering much more accessible – and explicit. Parts of last season unfolded before our eyes like scenes from a horror movie. This is from a tweet posted by Deceuninck-quickstep rider Fabio Jakobsen in October: ‘Surgery to reconstruct face/mouth… transplanting pelvic bone to lower jaw… implants for new teeth.’

That was two months after he collided with barriers at 80kmh during a stage of the Tour of Poland while jostling for position with Jumbo-visma’s Dylan Groenewegen (who was disqualified from the race and condemned for his ‘dangerous behaviour’ by the UCI).

Ten days later, Jakobsen’s teammate

Remco Evenepoel struck the low wall of a bridge and was catapulted into a ravine during Il Lombardia. He has only recently resumed training on the road after breaking his pelvis.

Completing a miserable run of high-profile and grisly accidents, Chloé Dygert suffered deep cuts to her left leg after crashing into a barrier during the World Championships. She put many fans off their breakfast by tweeting graphic photos of her injuries the next day.

Yet for all this, pain is part and parcel of professional sport, it’s just that perhaps bike racing takes it to another level. A bunch sprint at 70kmh calls for split-second decisionmaking; a 90kmh descent requires a calculated tightrope between daring and caution.

Sometimes discretion really is the better part of valour, although in the heat of battle an athlete may not always see it that way. Should Evenepoel, on what was a notorious descent, and Dygert, who was approaching a bend, have eased off slightly? Did adrenaline swamp the more rational parts of their brains?

More recently, World Champion Julian Alaphilippe suffered a season-ending spill near the climax of the Tour of Flanders when he rode into the back of an official’s motorbike. Did he suffer a momentary but catastrophic lapse of concentration? He was on the team radio as both Wout van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel successfully swerved around the same motorbike.

Boardman says no one was to blame but himself in 1995: ‘I was the man with his hands on the brakes – or not. They were my choices and I never held anyone else responsible.’

So yes, sometimes it is the fault of a third party, whether that be race organisers, a rival, an ineffective bottle cage or an unpredictable fan. But consider this: the Extreme Weather Protocol isn’t there just to protect riders from the elements, it’s to protect them from themselves, that pre-programmed part of their makeup that will ride until the finish line says stop. We must not get so caught up in the mythology of our sport that we forget our heroes make mistakes. They’re only human after all.

Still, the way in which they can get back up, dust themselves off and get back on their bikes? That does border the superhuman, and it’s why I’ll happily leave racing to the pros.

Geraint Thomas once described the sensation of crashing in the peloton as like driving along in a car at 30mph, opening the door and throwing yourself out