Debate over safety in Giro's 'typical terrible first stage': "Prehistoric barriers"

The crash in the opening stage of the Giro d'Italia has sparked debate among analysts. According to Jip van den Bos, the unsafe course partly caused the crash in the final kilometer, but Tom Dumoulin disagrees.

The last kilometers of the first stage to Burgas took the peloton at high speed along narrow roads after a relatively calm stage. About 500 meters from the finish, things went wrong when a rider from Uno-X slipped and took down a large part of the peloton. "At that moment it was just chaos, with barriers making it narrower, constant left turns... In the last 500 meters it gets narrower again, and I think that’s what caused the crash," Van den Bos said about it on Eurosport.

Dumoulin does not agree with his colleague Van den Bos. "It is just a typical first bad stage of a Grand Tour. It was completely flat, very calm, two early breakaways ahead. And then everyone goes into the finale with far too fresh legs. With very wide and essentially very safe roads. You want to finish in a town, of course it gets a bit narrower then."

Dangerous barriers
There was also criticism about the barriers along the roadside in the finale. Because the legs of the barriers stuck out onto the course, they were said to be unsafe, Johan Bruyneel said on the podcast THEMOVE. "You are 99.9 percent sure it will be a bunch sprint. Suddenly that last kilometer becomes so narrow. That is not good, that is a totally bad decision. And for the last 300, 400 meters there were already barriers, but those were prehistoric barriers that stuck out onto the road. I am not saying that caused it, but today that would no longer be allowed."

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