Matthew Brennan hits out at cycling safety after Finlay Tarling death: ‘Nothing has changed’

The 21-year-old Visma | Lease a Bike rider, who won five stages at this year’s Vuelta a España, was a friend of Tarling and watched his funeral in Aberystwyth this week.

For Brennan, the weeks since the 19 year old’s death have only strengthened his belief that professional cycling needs a more powerful and independent system to protect riders.

“It was very sad what happened with Fin,” Brennan told BBC Sport. “We were watching his funeral yesterday and I said to my friend: ‘It’s so sad we’ve lost someone so special and also nothing has changed.’

“I really think that is disgraceful.”

Brennan believes the sport should have treated Tarling’s death as a moment that demanded immediate change, particularly with reports of vehicles still appearing on race routes since the fatal accident.

“Instead of someone somewhere in these organisations saying: ‘OK, this should never ever happen again’, it feels the world has moved on, nothing has changed and there’s events where cars have been on the course still.”

There have already been further incidents since Tarling’s death. Less than a week later, Australian rider Maeve Plouffe encountered public traffic after a puncture left her less than two minutes behind the peloton during the Tour of Britain Women, despite the race convoy still being in sight.

Then, at the beginning of September, Lidl-Trek Future Racing rider Louis Leidert twice encountered cars during the opening time trial of the Sauerlandrundfahrt in Germany. One vehicle came towards him head on in the final kilometre, forcing both rider and driver to take evasive action. Less than a minute later, another car was on the course ahead of him near the finish.

Tarling died on 14 August while competing at the Volta a Portugal. The British rider was still racing when he encountered a van that had entered the route. Tarling collided with the vehicle at high speed and died as a result of the crash.

The circumstances of his death immediately raised wider questions about how races secure public roads, particularly at events that do not have the resources available to the biggest races on the calendar.

Major events such as the Tour de France can close roads well before the race arrives and deploy large numbers of police officers, marshals and barriers along the route. Smaller organisers are more likely to work with rolling road closures, temporarily stopping traffic as the race passes.

That system becomes more complicated when a race splits into several groups. The main peloton may already have passed while individual riders and smaller groups remain further behind.

Brennan believes cycling can no longer accept those differences in safety standards.

“It’s unbelievable, because you’ve lost a friend and when nothing changes it is really shocking,” he said.

He would like to see an independent organisation given the authority to judge whether races are safe and to hold organisers and governing bodies accountable.

“In my personal opinion, there should be an independent organisation that holds the organisations, the UCI and everything accountable to some very strict rules that makes sure the safety of the riders is held as a priority.”

The UCI has taken steps of its own in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the governing body said it wanted to introduce real time GPS safety tracking for riders and race vehicles across professional road cycling, starting with WorldTour events, with protocols and a regulatory framework to be developed for the system.

Brennan’s criticism adds to growing concern within professional cycling over how the sport responds to serious safety incidents.

EF Education-EasyPost boss Jonathan Vaughters has been particularly critical of suggestions that vehicles entering an active race course are simply an unavoidable risk of racing on public roads.

“What I'm really not enjoying is this sentiment that's coming from very powerful people in cycling, that says: ‘What can you do? Sometimes cars just end up on the road, this is just part of doing competitive sport on the open road,’” Vaughters told BBC Sport.

“That is not true. This is preventable.”

Vaughters has also questioned the gap in safety standards between cycling’s biggest races and events operating with fewer resources, saying teams have considerably more confidence in races such as the Tour de France.

“As a team, we trust races like the Tour de France, but we don’t trust smaller races,” he said. “The number of smaller races I’ve been to where there’s traffic on the course is unreal.”

Visma | Lease a Bike CEO Richard Plugge has voiced similar frustration and believes the discussion may eventually need to go beyond improving existing safety measures.

“What really disappoints me is that everyone says how terrible it is, but immediately afterwards there is a ‘but’,” Plugge told WielerFlits following Tarling’s death. “I would say we should skip everything that comes after the ‘but’. This simply cannot happen.”

Plugge has suggested that cycling may even have to reconsider traditional point to point races if organisers can no longer guarantee the safety of riders across roughly 200 kilometres of public road. Shorter circuits that can be fully secured could, in his view, become part of the solution.

For Brennan, however, the immediate issue is simpler. After losing a friend, he wants to see evidence that cycling has learned from what happened.

A month after Tarling’s death, he does not believe that evidence is there yet.