Eighty two minutes. That’s how long Muriel Furrer lay undiscovered off the side of the road after she crashed during the junior women’s road race at the 2024 UCI Road World Championships in Zürich. By the time the 18-year-old was found and given medical assistance, it was too late. She died of a traumatic head injury. We’ll never know if earlier intervention would have prevented the tragic death, but we do know that for almost an hour and a half, the Swiss rider was missing and alone.
Eighteen months on, the investigation into her death has been closed, according to the public prosecutor's office in Zürich. No third-party involvement or "criminally relevant breach of duty" was found. Furrer crashed alone on a descent, unseen, “out of sight of support vehicles, race officials, spectators, and marshals,” the report read. With no tracking equipment employed, and no race radios, there was no immediate sense that anything had gone wrong, until it became clear that it really had.
