Occupational hazard: Pro Cyclings Safety Problem (or lack of it).
On Friday, on stage 8 of the Volta a Portugal, a 19-year-old British rider named Finlay Tarling was descending near the back of the race when he met a van coming the other way. The driver had entered the course through a secondary access point, past the signage, against the direction of the race. Finlay had lost contact with the peloton, and the protection motorbikes had ridden ahead to cover other dropped riders, so he was effectively alone on a closed road that wasn't closed. He died at the scene. He was in the first year of a two-year contract. His older brother rides in the WorldTour.
The race was neutralised. The podium ceremony was cancelled. The final leader wore a black jersey instead of yellow. Statements were issued, condolences extended, a minute's silence observed. Cycling has become extremely good at this part. The liturgy of mourning is polished to a shine, because we get so much practice.
Asked how a member of the public drove onto a race course, the local police commander said something that has been rattling around my head ever since: it is impossible to place an officer at every access point.
Impossible. Hold that word. We'll come back to it.
Here is a list that a reader more diligent than any governing body put together, of riders who have died since 2016. Racing, training, elite and development. Read it slowly. Look at the ages.
2016: Antoine Demoitié, 25, professional.
2016: Daan Myngheer, 22, continental.
2016: Gijs Verdick, 21, continental.
2017: Michele Scarponi, 37, WorldTour.
2017: Chad Young, 21, continental.
2017: Jason Lowndes, 23, professional.
2018: Michael Goolaerts, 23, professional.
2018: Jimmy Duquennoy, 23, professional.
2019: Robert de Greef, 27, continental.
2019: Bjorg Lambrecht, 22, WorldTour.
2019: Stef Loos, 19, elite.
2021: Desiet Kidane, 21, continental.
2022: Suleiman Kangangi, 33, professional.
2022: Davide Rebellin, 51, former professional.
2023: Gino Mäder, 26, WorldTour.
2023: Tijl De Decker, 22, professional.
2024: André Drege, 25, professional.
2024: Muriel Furrer, 18, junior elite.
2025: Sara Piffer, 19, continental.
2025: Samuele Privitera, 19, continental.
2026: Cristian Camilo Muñoz, 30, professional.
2026: Finlay Tarling, 19, development.
2026: Francesco Mazzoleni, 18, U23.
2026: Milan Bral, 21, U23.
At least twenty-four people. And I have to write "at least" because here is the first thing that should stop you cold: there is no official ledger. No governing body publishes a running account of the dead. That list exists because fans compile it in comment sections. A sport that measures everything, that can tell you a rider's watts per kilogram from a decade ago, does not formally count its own fatalities.
Now let me tell you about a sport that counts. Formula 1 killed drivers routinely for decades, and treated it as the price of speed, right up until Imola 1994, when Ayrton Senna died on live television and the sport decided that actually, no, this was not a price, it was a failure. What followed was not a poster campaign. It was an engineering culture: every death and every near-miss treated as a problem with a discoverable cause and a mandatory fix. Barriers, crash structures, medical response, circuit design, all of it rebuilt. When Jules Bianchi died from injuries sustained at Suzuka in 2014, the response was the halo, a titanium bar over the cockpit that drivers and fans initially hated because it was ugly and un-romantic. Then it started catching cars. Ask Romain Grosjean, who walked out of a fireball. Ask Zhou Guanyu, who slid upside down across Silverstone into the fencing. Nobody talks about the aesthetics anymore.
Since 1994, Formula 1, a sport where the cars pass each other at 300kph, has lost one driver at a race weekend.
Cycling, in the same period during which F1 lost none at all, has the list above, and the list keeps its rhythm: one or two or three names a year, metronomic, each one mourned sincerely and investigated barely. After Demoitié was killed by a race motorbike in 2016, the riders themselves proposed concrete things, convoy speed limits, passing protocols. That was a decade ago. In the years since we got SafeR, the sport's safety body, founded after Gino Mäder died in a ravine at the Tour de Suisse, and a year after that Geraint Thomas summarised progress in five words: nothing has changed since Gino. The injury data agrees with him. By the sport's own running tallies, recent seasons have been the worst on record.
So why? Why does one sport treat death as an engineering failure and the other treat it as weather?
I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable answer: cycling has quietly reclassified dying as part of the job description. You hear it in the language around the sport, the reverence for suffering, the romance of risk, the descents "where the race can be won." Somewhere in there, professional cyclist slid into the same mental category as firefighter or deep-sea welder: a profession where mortal danger is simply understood to be in the contract. And we, the fans, are part of it. We call the danger "spectacle" when it thrills us and "tragedy" when it kills someone, and the two words are describing the same corners.
But the firefighter comparison collapses the moment you press on it, in both directions. A firefighter accepts risk to pull people out of burning buildings. A bike racer is asked to accept it so that we can watch something exciting with our coffee. And here's the sharper edge: even the professions that genuinely require danger don't shrug at death the way cycling does. When a firefighter dies, there is an investigation, findings, protocol changes with dates on them. Dangerous professions earn their danger by refusing to accept any death as unexplainable. Cycling skips that part and goes straight to the black armbands.
The standard defence is that cycling is different because its stadium is the public road. You can't halo a bike. You can't crash-structure a human body doing 90 down an Alp in cloth. All true. Cycling can never be safe, and nobody serious is asking for that. But listen to what that argument has become in practice: because we cannot fix everything, we are excused from fixing anything. "The roads can never be fully closed" has stopped being an engineering constraint and become a moral alibi.
Because a van driving onto a race course through an unmanned access point is not fate. It is a checkpoint that wasn't staffed. A dropped teenager descending alone, outside the protective bubble of the convoy, is not fate. It is a known gap in the system, the same gap every rider who has ever been out the back knows intimately. Finish-line furniture, cliff-edge descents without protection, convoy vehicles threading through a strung-out race: these are not acts of God. They are line items. F1 looked at its own version of "impossible" and treated it as a to-do list. That is the whole difference between the two sports. Not money, though money helps. The refusal to file death under overheads.
The police commander said it is impossible to place an officer at every access point. Maybe. It was also impossible to make an open-cockpit car survive a 67G barrier strike, until it was mandatory.
I don't know which specific failures took which of the twenty-four names on that list, and that is precisely the problem. Nobody officially does. There is no cycling equivalent of the accident report that follows every F1 incident, no public findings, no mandated fixes with deadlines. There is a minute's silence, a neutralised stage, and the next race. The sport counts everything about its riders except how many of them it loses.
Finlay Tarling was nineteen. The list should have stopped long before it reached him. It won't stop after him either, not until cycling decides that the deaths of its workers are failures to be engineered out rather than hazards to be eulogised. Formula 1 made that decision thirty years ago, in grief, on a spring weekend in Italy, and it has buried almost no one since.
Cycling's Imola moment keeps happening. The sport keeps hitting snooze and il be honest im sickened by it.