I received the Global Cycling Network notification about Gino Mäder’s death just as I was setting out on my Friday morning ride. I had been following the Tour de Suisse, one of the last big races before the Tour de France begins next Saturday, and I knew that the young Swiss rider had crashed on a descent in stage five. It was a bad accident, as any crash at 60 mi/h on a narrow alpine road would be, but crashes are a part of bike racing. I hoped for Mäder’s speedy recovery, confident that, even if he missed the rest of this season he would undoubtedly be back for the next, and I thought nothing more of it.
He died in the night, and I read about it just as I was lifting my leg over my bike for a planned 30-mile ride in rural central New Jersey. It gave me a lot to think about.
Ours is a dangerous sport; crashes happen all the time. Back in the days before digital streaming, there was even a compilation video going around of some of the most gruesome crashes in the sport entitled Crash! Road Cycling’s Greatest Crashes! produced by Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen for World Cycling Productions, and featuring Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, Laurent Jalabert, George Hincapie, and Eddy Merckx. Having crashed myself a few times, the mere thought of it made me queasy. You don’t easily forget that slick, waxy feeling of a shaved leg sliding across pavement as you go down at high speed.
It probably made Phil and Paul a little sick, too, since they declined to appear on the video and instead tapped Bob “Bobke” Roll to offer his garbled narration. But a lot of the customers at the bike shop where I then worked loved it and the video flew off the shelves. Even today, the five YouTube videos of Jalabert’s spectacular crash in the first stage of the 1994 Tour de France have more than 600,000 views between them. For some reason, people find it exciting; it one of the things that makes road cycling an extreme sport. Danger, after all, is part of cycling.
It is sobering to reflect, however, that more than 130 professional bike racers have died in competition on the road, track, and courses in the history of the sport. This adds up to almost one fatality per year since Pierre Froget crashed in a tandem race at the Vichy Velodrome in the summer of 1894. Some racers died in freak accidents, like when a car ploughed into the course at the Targa Chiara in Florence in 1936 and hit Gino Bartali’s brother Giulio. Others died by misadventure, like Tom Simpson, who collapsed on Mon Ventoux in the 13th stage of the 1967 Tour de France with heatstroke and a heart arrhythmia aggravated by amphetamines.
Cycling has always been an extreme sport, where crowds come out to watch athletes push the limits of strength and endurance. The most popular parts of the Grand Tour races are invariably the stages in the high mountain passes and peaks, like the Passo di Gavia in the Giro d’Italia, where you can watch riders battle blizzards and ride between columns of ice in May, or the Alto de L’Angliru in the Vuelta d’España, which finishes on a 24 percent grade goat path at 5,000 feet above sea level. “What do they want?” asked Team Kelme coach Vincente Belda in 1999 when the climb was first featured in the Vuelta, “Blood?”
Yes; they want blood, or at least suffering. It is the nature of sports that the audiences who tune-in to watch the Tour de France or Paris Roubaix don’t want to see a cakewalk; they want to see great athletes overcome adversity and surmount nigh-impossible obstacles in the high mountains, or on the bloodied cobbles of the Arenberg Forest. This is what glues their eyeballs to sponsor messages on the racers’ jerseys and whenever Roll and Christian Vande Velde announce that “we’re going to take a brief break” from the action.
There is always going to be danger in extreme sport. Even in the earliest days of bike racing, fans came out to the velodromes of Europe and North America to watch six-day races on the track. These featured six days of racing – limited only by Sunday closing laws – in which competitors vied to cover the greatest distance in 144 hours. There was no rule that said that they had to be on the track the whole time, and couldn’t take a break. But that mean your opponent was making up time when you were resting, so the racers would use every means at their disposal, from caffeine to cocaine, to stay on the bike continuously. Spectators thrilled as the delirious bicyclists collapsed and crashed into the stands in the later days of the race, finally leaving one man riding slowly as the clock ticked down.
Even by the standards of the late-19th century, the heyday of bare-knuckles boxing, this was too much. Health regulations introduced in the United States in the late-1890s prohibited athletes from competing in any event for more than 12 hours per day. At Madison Square Garden in New York, promoters introduced a new event, the Madison race, where cyclists would compete in teams of two, ensuring six days of continuous action without breaking any laws.
While I understand the logic of extreme sport, and tune-in to watch road, track, cyclocross, and mountain bike racing whenever I can, I still shudder when I see a rider go down. I am thrilled when they get back on the bike and carry on, their clothing torn, and their flanks bleeding like raw meat in the butcher shop display case, but I have had enough accidents of my own to know what kind of pain they are in. And it isn’t pretty.
Yet, death in sport – in what is supposed to be a celebration of human strength and potential, of life itself – feels like betrayal. Each one of the deaths in this sport that I love has left a profound impression on me. I remember Fabio Casartelli’s death on the descent of the Col de Portet d’Aspet in the 15th stage of the 1995 Tour de France, Andrey Kivilev’s in the second stage of the 2003 Paris-Nice, and downhill mountain biking pioneer “Earthquake” Jake Watson’s in a crash on a training run at the 1999 Keysville Classic. The death of Mäder last Friday only opens old wounds and amplifies the pain.
What makes it even more painful is the knowledge that thousands of citizen cyclists are killed each year for every professional bike racer who dies in a crash. Almost 1,000 cyclists die in accidents every year in the United States alone, with 130,000 more sustaining injuries requiring hospitalization. Almost all of these accidents involved a motor vehicle. These are not highly-trained professional athletes on closed roads who know the risks of their sport, but ordinary people out for a spin, a group ride, or along the canal tow-path to Wegman’s to buy groceries and, more often than not, at the mercy of the potentially lethal flow of traffic all around them.
Perhaps the problem is that many cyclists are not actually fully aware of the risks; after all, cycling is healthy, fun, and evokes a childlike sense of freedom… how could it come with mortal hazards? The principles of cycling safety should go without saying but, often enough, they don’t. I have seen many more than a few people on bikes take stupid risks, riding obliviously, or in and out of traffic. I can only suspect that the kind of safety training that I got in elementary school, when they painted a big figure-8 in the parking lot of Dorset School one spring day and set out a course with pylons and ribbon, just doesn’t happen anymore.
These principles are: Stay alert, keep your eyes open and scanning the road ahead, stop at intersections and look both ways (left first) before crossing, listen for traffic, keep to bike lanes where possible, don’t ride against traffic (keep on the right side of the road unless you’re in the UK or Australia), signal turns and stops, know your limits, and stay alert (again). Most of my riding buddies, in my cycling club and elsewhere, have internalized these principles, and maybe that’s just one benefit of joining a club. Each ride begins with “the riot act,” the recitation of safety precautions and the rules of the road, and they are repeated so often that you don’t have to think about them. Jim, who leads some of the rides, adds the special rule “don’t die. If you die,” he always says, “you won’t be allowed back.” It’s a dumb joke, but it’s a good one, and it makes the point.
Above all, wear a helmet.
It seems almost inconceivable today, but there was a time when few cyclists at any level of the sport wore any head protection more substantial than a cloth cycling cap. Sure, the trackies, and the fast men of pro racing, like Eddy Merckx and Erik de Vlaminck would sometimes be seen wearing “Belgian hairnets” (headgear made of strips of padded leather) on the cobbles of the spring classics, but I laughed out loud when my older brother, a committed long-distance tourer, came home from ABC Cycle with a Bell Biker helmet in the late-1970s. I thought it made him look like a dork.
The Biker was the first commercially-available hardshell helmet, and it sparked a revolution. By the early-90s, when I was deep into mountain biking, even I started wearing a helmet. They had become required equipment in World Cup, NORBA, and local racing scenes, and everyone was wearing vented blobs of white polystyrene with Lycra covers. It was my hero, John Tomac, who really sold me on it, though; when I saw his picture on the packaging for Bell’s Image helmet, that made it cool.
Mountain bike racers seemed to know something that roadies and a whole lot of neighborhood cyclists didn’t: cycling can be a dangerous sport, and it is frankly stupid not to take this basic precaution. Road racers resisted even this basic truth. After Casartelli died, the Union Cycliste Internationale introduced rules requiring helmets, but did nothing to enforce them. Racers sometimes wore helmets, and… sometimes they didn’t, especially in the high mountains.
A pharmaceutically-enhanced Lance Armstrong crossed the finish line of the finish of the 9th stage of the 1999 Tour de France in the alpine town of Sestrières with his cloth cap sitting rakishly on his head. Only four years after the death of his teammate and friend Casartelli, he couldn’t be bothered. In fairness, few pro road racers bothered, either, despite the fact that, at other levels of the sport, regional governing bodies like USA Cycling had implemented helmet mandates. They all whined that the helmets were uncomfortable, or that they somehow impeded their efforts, or that no helmet would have saved Casartelli.
That was the mantra as late as twenty years ago. Even I, accustomed by then to wearing head protection, would sometimes take my helmet off and hang it on the bars of my Marinoni as I crossed the Estacade du Pont Champlain across the St. Lawrence River to the car-free road along Îles-de-la-Couvée. I remember the last time I rode with someone who did not wear a helmet at all – one of Henry’s friends, who wore a stylish cloth cap with T-Mobile colors on a rainy group ride around the western tip of the island of Montreal.
Then, Kivilev was in a routine pile-up, with nary a car nor obstacles in sight, on a relatively flat stage in St-Chamond. Racers Marek Rutkiewicz and Volker Ordowski, both wearing helmets, weren’t hurt, and finished the stage. Kivilev did not get up; he had not been wearing a helmet and, when he fell from his bike and struck his head on the pavement, he suffered a catastrophic brain injury. Kivilev died the following day.
It took a year for the UCI to finally pass a rule requiring racers to wear protective helmets at all times, with no exceptions (except time-trials, where they wore aerodynamic helmets not designed for protection until recently). There was grumbling, of course, but by the following year, no one in pro cycling went without one. With the romantic image of the racer in their cycling cap conquering the Alps gone, helmets in recreational road cycling became virtually universal. I don’t know if Henry’s friend is still going around in his cloth cap, but I doubt it.
Mäder was wearing a helmet, and it didn’t save him. Even this most common-sense precaution has it limits, and that underscores the fact that, whatever we do, cycling comes with risks. Bike racing is, after all, racing, and if there is going to be a sport at all, it’s hard to imagine how one could prevent racers from making up time on descents after hard climbs. Compared to many other sports – like tennis, soccer, track and field – cycling is very, very dangerous. One might hope, however, that the UCI will take the time to investigate ways to make the sport safer, as it did after Kivilev died, and prevent future tragedies.
Gino Mäder knew the joy of cycling as he entered what was surely going to be the peak years of his racing career. The 26-year-old racer spoke of it in an interview at the end of the opening time trial of this year’s Tour de Suisse. He had finished a respectable 69th out of a field of 161, but the race result wasn’t his only reason for celebration. Like so many of us in the sport, he just loved riding a bike. Flashing a big grin, he told the interviewer that what made him happy was “if I’m still healthy, and I enjoy my home race.” It is difficult to watch the interview, knowing that he would be dead five days later.
The one thing that we all share – roadies, mountain bikers, BMXers, gravel riders, commuters, weekend explorers, and even bike couriers and delivery people – is the joy that we experience, describing perfect circles with our feet, and feeling the slipstream brushing across our faces and through our helmet vents. And Mäder felt that, too.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the dangers out there. The hazards are many, and cyclists come in all shapes, sizes, styles, disciplines, and skill levels. Nor should we abandon the sport that gives us so much pleasure and so many opportunities for adventure and personal growth. Ask any cyclist, and they will tell you without hesitation that cycling makes their lives better and makes them a better person.
But we can do everything that we can to minimize our risks and the risks to those around us who we explore the open roads and trails at high speed and low. As Sergeant Esterhaus use to tell the squad room at the start of every episode of Hill Street Blues:
“Let’s Roll. And let’s be careful out there.”