‘It could have avoided a situation like this’ - Hansen calls for wider GPS tracking after Tarling's death

Adam Hansen believes the death of Finlay Tarling exposed a specific failure in how rolling road closures are managed, and that GPS tracking already in use at the World Championships could have prevented it.

Tarling died on 14 August after a head-on collision with a van on stage 8 of the Volta a Portugal. The 19-year-old had been dropped from his group and was chasing alone.

“Every group on the road has some type of motorbike in front for protecting them from cars in the situation when a car does come from a driveway or intersection,” Hansen said on the Domestique Hotseat podcast. “And this rider was dropped and was by himself, and there was no police motorbike.”

That is the gap he thinks tracking closes. The system deployed at the Worlds in Kigali last year and again in Montréal last month tracks vehicles as well as riders.

“Not only do they have the riders, they also have the police bikes and the cars and everything,” he said. “If it would have been the World Championships’ tracking system, someone would have seen this. They would have seen that a rider is unsupported by a police motorbike and could have radioed to the race regulator, which is the person on the motorbike regulating the convoy and when the cars can pass, and send a motorbike back or forwards to protect the rider.”

“So it made the point that we really need to get serious about these GPS trackers and get them implemented as soon as possible, because it could have avoided a situation like this.”

Hansen also described what happens inside the sport’s safety bodies following a fatal incident. 

“When something like this happens, the CPA just goes manic, everyone gets angry. And then the people that are not inside SafeR Cycling and the CPA, they put extra pressure on the members that are inside SafeR,” he said. “And then in SafeR we try to get as much information as possible, why it happened, how to avoid it in the future. And this really showed the holes in these rolling closures.”

He is not claiming any system makes a race safe. Organisers, he says, have told him outright that total protection is impossible, and he pointed to a DHL vehicle entering the course at Coppa Bernocchi as an example of the process working as intended, with police stopping the vehicle before the riders came through.

The UCI Management Committee stressed the need to deploy GPS tracking of riders and vehicles across professional road racing at its meeting in Montréal last month, starting with the WorldTour and Women’s WorldTour. It set no timeline, saying the protocols and regulatory framework would be developed as quickly as possible.

Vehicles have remained in the news since. Marcel Camprubí and Tom Gloag were hit head-on by a police motorbike travelling the wrong way at Tre Valli Varesine on Tuesday, with Gloag needing stitches and Camprubí posting a photograph of his snapped fork.

NSN Cycling Team, for whom Tarling rode, have launched an annual scholarship in his memory for Welsh riders aged 15 to 20.