Tom Bachmann, dpa
The images still give you goosebumps. A photograph by Muriel Furrer flickers across a giant screen on the rain-soaked shores of Lake Zurich. People gather in front of it, bowing their heads beneath their umbrellas. Silence. It was meant to be a huge cycling celebration. With the death of the 18-year-old, it became one of the most tragic title races in World Championships history.
A week from Sunday, at the end of the Road Cycling World Championships in Montreal, it will be the second anniversary of Furrer’s death. A few days earlier, the International Cycling Union (UCI) will introduce mandatory GPS trackers for all riders at all major races. That actually sounds like a sensible measure. Nevertheless, a dispute has flared up between the teams and the UCI, with positions firmly entrenched. And on closer inspection, the measure misses the point of the actual problem.
“As teams, we are the first to prioritise safety,” said team manager Ronny Lauke of the German women’s team Canyon-Sram. “It’s good that the trackers exist. But that doesn’t solve the problem.” That’s because the issue lies more with the safety of the course than with live tracking.
Allegations of blackmail
The decision to make GPS use compulsory at all professional races this coming Wednesday in Montreal is seen as a mere formality. However, there is no joint proposal from the federation, the teams and the organisers. As a result, it comes across more as a dictate from the UCI.
What had happened? Junior skier Furrer suffered a serious fall during a downhill run in 2024. Nobody saw the fall, and the Swiss skier’s disappearance went unnoticed at first. An hour and a half later, Furrer was found in a wooded area. She was pronounced dead the following day. To prevent something like this from happening again in future, long-standing calls for GPS trackers to be fitted to every professional skier have resurfaced. This would have triggered an alarm almost immediately, setting the rescue chain in motion.
Just under a year after the Furrer incident, a row broke out. At the Women’s Tour de Romandie, the UCI demanded that, as a trial, one rider per team should have a GPS tracker fitted to her bike. The issue of liability remained unresolved, as did the question of what would happen to the data collected. Some teams have contracts with data service providers. Team Lidl called for “cooperation rather than coercion”. Five teams refused to take part in the pilot project and were excluded from the race. “I will not be blackmailed when it comes to safety,” said UCI President David Lappartient.
GPS is not the solution
Legally speaking, the case is not yet closed. In March this year, the UCI relented, allowing the teams to choose their own GPS transmitters and restricting the data stream to speed and position.
A fall like Furrer’s would have happened even if she’d been wearing a GPS tracker. The Swiss skier would certainly have been found more quickly, but nobody knows whether she would still be alive today as a result. The real problem is, and remains, the safety of the course. Changes have already been made there, but there is still a long way to go.
Criticism of the ban on mobile phones at the World Cup
It was only in mid-August that 19-year-old Englishman Finlay Tarling died. A van had driven onto the cordoned-off route during the Tour of Portugal, and Tarling collided with the vehicle at high speed. Three weeks later, during the Tour of the Sauerland in Brilon, German professional Louis Leidert narrowly avoided a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle.
Former professional Fabian Wegmann highlighted the seemingly intractable problem. “We cordon off the race from start to finish, but we can’t block off every garage exit. A car can always turn left and then it’s out on the road,” said the course director of the Tour of Germany on ARD. “It’s often down to individual mistakes, too. All it takes is for one person to take their eye off the ball or pop to the loo, and that’s it – it’s already happened.”
What is causing heads to shake when it comes to the World Championships is the ban on radio communication. “That’s so old-fashioned – the World Championships should be setting an example for innovation,” said Richard Plugge, team manager of two-time Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard. The bitter irony is that whilst the GPS trackers trigger an alarm in the control room, the riders cannot be warned that a crash may have happened ahead of them.
A security project with no impact
The SafeR project was launched in 2023 to gain a better understanding of what leads to crashes or accidents. The aim was, above all, to work independently. That came to an end by February of this year at the latest. At that point, the UCI, riders and organisers voted to use 300,000 euros from the SafeR budget to fund a legal dispute between the world governing body and a components manufacturer. The teams did not agree with this, as it would have meant that some of them would have been taking legal action against one of their own sponsors.
Meanwhile, doubts are growing about the value of SafeR. Although data is continually being provided and analysed statistically, Causes of crashes, such as riding errors, slippery roads, traffic islands or a lack of marshals, are identified. There are also yellow cards issued for dangerous manoeuvres. Yet the prevailing feeling in the peloton is that the accident rate remains unchanged. SafeR does not provide any publicly available data on trends in the crash rate.
When Urska Zigart, the fiancée of superstar Tadej Pogacar, fell over a speed bump earlier this year and broke her jaw, the Women’s Cyclists’ Association spoke out clearly. “Serious accidents are still happening and we need to question this. We need to look at whether and how SafeR can work more effectively,” said Alessandra Cappellotto.
Helmets, airbags, gears
Even though track safety is the largest area of focus, the issue of safety is significantly more complex. Many adjustments have already been made and further changes are planned. Adam Hansen, head of the riders’ association, raised the issue of helmets. These are approved to a standard based on accidents occurring at 19.5 km/h. “That’s not enough for road cycling. We need a major upgrade here,” said Hansen.
Experiments with airbags are constantly being carried out. Carrying them would, of course, increase the weight, and the reactions reflect this. If you ask around the peloton, airbags would only be used if they were compulsory. It’s either all of them or none at all. A move by the UCI to limit gear ratios in order to reduce speeds ended up where many things in cycling unnecessarily end up: in court.
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