Plugge suggests radical race change after Tarling death amid growing safety fears

The Visma | Lease a Bike team CEO believes the response from within the sport has been far too muted after Tarling died during the Volta a Portugal, after he collided with a van that had entered the race route while riders were still competing.

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

Tarling was riding behind the main peloton when a vehicle was allowed onto the course. With several competitors still on the road, he encountered the vehicle while descending and suffered the fatal collision.

For Plugge, that should make the incident impossible to dismiss as one of the unavoidable risks of racing on public roads.

“Can you imagine this happening in Formula 1?” he said. “That suddenly a car drives onto the circuit in the opposite direction?"

Plugge’s criticism also extends to SafeR, the safety organisation established after the death of Gino Mäder in 2023 and designed to assess risks and improve safety standards across professional road racing.

While he remains supportive of the original idea, Plugge believes its role has changed.

“I have said it before. SafeR has become a political construction where compromises are constantly being made to keep everyone happy,” he said. “But this is about riders being able to do their jobs safely.”

SafeR has influenced several recent race safety measures, including changes to parcours design and additional protection at dangerous points. Plugge, however, questions whether the organisation still has the authority and urgency required to deal with the sport’s biggest structural risks.

“What surprises me is that neither UCI president David Lappartient nor anyone else from the governing organisations stands up and says: ‘Wait a minute, we really need to come together now and work out how we prevent this from happening again,’” Plugge said.

“We had a fantastic initiative with SafeR, but I hear very little about it now. Maybe we as teams need to take responsibility for race safety again.”

Plugge is not alone in questioning whether cycling has accepted too much risk.

EF Education-EasyPost CEO Jonathan Vaughters voiced similar concerns following Tarling’s death, arguing that the idea that cars occasionally entering a race course is simply part of road cycling should be rejected.

“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,’” Vaughters told BBC Sport. “That is not true. This is preventable.”

Vaughters also highlighted what he sees as a significant gap between cycling’s biggest events and races operating with smaller budgets. Major races such as the Tour de France can secure roads long before the peloton arrives and station police or officials at virtually every intersection. At smaller events, rolling road closures are far more common.

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

His concern is particularly relevant when races split into several groups. Once the main peloton has passed, motorists and residents can assume the race is over even while dropped riders or smaller groups remain on the route.

“People think, ‘The race is done, I’m free to go on the road,’” Vaughters said. “Rolling enclosures, I don’t think work that well.”

While Vaughters acknowledged the enormous financial pressure facing smaller organisers, he argued that cost cannot become an excuse for exposing riders to an unacceptable level of danger.

“There have been too many races at this level that have exactly the same problem,” he said. “This just happened to be terribly unlucky. It could have been any of the other races.”

Plugge believes the solution may eventually require cycling to challenge one of its most established traditions.

“If racing from A to B over 200 kilometres on public roads no longer works, then we have to ride circuits of 15, 20 or 25 kilometres, provided those roads can be made 100 percent safe,” he said.

That would represent a significant change for professional road cycling, where long point to point routes are central to the identity of many events.

Plugge believes circuit racing could nevertheless provide a realistic answer as traffic levels rise and controlling hundreds of kilometres of public road becomes increasingly complicated.

He points to the World Championships, where races often finish with repeated laps of a local circuit and still produce huge crowds and compelling racing.

“What does our sport look like in five years? Can we still race 200 kilometres from A to B? Probably not, because then you need a thousand traffic marshals.”