Video: Vehicle enters Eneco Tour course days after Il Lombardia safety protest

Television footage from the Eneco Tour showed a police motorcycle outrider flagging down a green vehicle that was driving just ahead of the breakaway with 70km to go. 

The vehicle was directed it to pull in on the roadside while escapees Rick Ottema (EEW-VDK), Luke Verburg (Azerion/Villa Valkenburg) and Johan Dorussen (Metec-Solarwatt) came past.

The episode was the latest in a sequence of instances of vehicles entering the route of professional bike races. 

At the Volta ao Algarve in August, Finlay Tarling was killed when he was struck by a motorist who entered the course on stage 8 of the Volta a Portugal. He was 19 years old.

At Tre Valli Varesine last week, a police motorcyclist reportedly travelled against the direction of the race, causing the Pinarello-Q36.5 pair of Marcel Camprubí and Thomas Gloag to crash.

At the Coppa Bernocchi, a DHL delivery van pulled onto the course from a side road and drove behind the breakaway before it was ushered off the course again.

The peloton delayed the start of Il Lombardia by five minutes on Saturday morning in order to pay tribute to Finlay Tarling and to highlight the UCI and race organisers’ failure to improve safety standards in the weeks since his tragic death.

Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost) and Tom Pidcock (Pinarello-Q36.5) were the initial organisers of the protest, and they enlisted support from riders on other teams. The riders made a point of organising the action themselves rather than involving the riders’ union, the CPA. 

European champion Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) served as the spokesperson for the riders in Bergamo on Saturday, taking the microphone to explain their protest.

“To the organisers who will organise races in the future, please make sure that we can race safely and that we can just do what we like to do without being worried about cars, motorbikes, all that stuff coming into the course,” Evenepoel said, to warm applause from the spectators in the start area.

At the finish of Il Lombardia in Como, Healy underlined the rationale for the protest.

“With what’s happened this week and this summer, especially, I think there’s a consensus in the peloton that not enough is being done by particularly the UCI,” Healy said. “I think this is just us standing together to show we’re not happy.