A furious Remco Evenepoel slammed the Vuelta a España organisers for race conditions in the opening stage, which the defending champion described as “super-dangerous”.
The 14.8-kilometre TTT on stage 1 through the streets of Barcelona was held mid-way through Saturday evening. Teeming rain - the first in two months in the city - rendered multiple corners even more risky, on roads suffering from street grime due to the usual intense traffic.
Some riders then complained that the encroaching darkness during the evening severely affected their visibility, with Evenepoel so angry he did not even seek shelter from the rain before letting loose a torrent of criticism about the course conditions to reporters.
“It was ridiculous to have a TTT in this dark, we don’t see any shit, the road was super dangerous, and full of water, we are not monkeys in a circus;” was Evenepoel’s opening broadside.
“You guys need lights on your cameras,” Evenepoel pointed out to journalists, “that means it’s dark.
“So can you imagine what it was like out there sitting on the wheel, getting water in your face, not seeing one metre in front of you?”
Soudal-QuickStep came through the course with no major incidents, bar a puncture for James Knox. But other squads like Ineos Grenadiers were not so fortunate, with Laurens de Plus crashing out and injured on the first day, and both Alpecin-Deceunink and Jayco-AIUIa suffered major mass pileups.
The Vuelta has held night-time opening TTTs in the past, most recently in 2010 in Seville. But back then the roads stayed dry and there were no notable incidents.
In the 2014 the Giro d’Italia's opening TTT in Belfast, also held at night on slippery conditions caused by intermittent, heavy, rain showers, caused four riders to go down. One rider lost control riding over a manhole cover, with local star Dan Martin breaking his collarbone and abandoning.
Nine years on in Barcelona, Evenepoel claimed that the race conditions were so hard that most of the GC teams had opted to take things easily on the corners so as not to risk crashing on the first stage of a 21-day race.
But while he pointed out that nobody could help rain happening, the excessively dark course, in his opinion, rendered the race overly unsafe by a considerable margin.
“For sure they will criticise me for saying this, but it’s just dangerous. It’s like driving your car at 200 kilometres an hour in the full dark in the highway with no lights on,” he said.
The organisation should not have cancelled the stage, he said, before adding with a dose of heavy irony, “[they should] just know that it can be dark at night and in the evenings.
“We had the whole day to do the TTT, we had to wait til night. You cannot change the rain, but you can change the time,” he insisted.
“We have to go on the limit because we want to win, so we risk already a lot. But being superdark and supersketchy, in my eyes it’s just ridiciulous.”
Soudal-QuickStep finished fourth on the stage, but as Evenepoel pointed out, the GC squads “went superslow becaause they couldn’t see anything or race at 100 percent.” In such conditions, logically, the battle for the overall was put on hold for another day.
Cyclingnews has reached out to the organisers for comment.
We’ve seen loads of Game of Thrones episodes that weren’t as dark as the opening stage of #LaVuelta23.Photo: @GettySport pic.twitter.com/cOC4yNGCvvAugust 26, 2023
