Are circuit races the answer to greater safety? Visma team boss Plugge suggests major changes as he calls for UCI action following death of Finlay Tarling

Following the death of teenager Finlay Tarling earlier this month, Visma-Lease a Bike team boss Richard Plugge has called for the sport as a whole to take more serious action and potentially consider radical changes to ensure a similar incident doesn’t happen again.

Tarling died during stage 8 of the Volta a Portugal in a collision with a vehicle that had entered the closed race route. In response to the tragic incident, tributes poured in for the 19-year-old Welshman and a fundraiser set up in his memory to help young people in Wales get into cycling received significant donations.

“We are just carrying on. What disappoints me enormously is that everyone says it is terrible, but then immediately a ‘but’ follows,” the Visma boss told Wielerflits, speaking at the Vuelta a España.

“I would say: we need to skip everything after the ‘but’. This simply cannot happen. That is the attitude we must adopt as the cycling community.

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“This boy encounters a car on a descent. Can you imagine this happening during Formula 1 in Zandvoort? That a car is suddenly driving on the track in the opposite direction? Of course, everyone says that this doesn’t happen at Zandvoort. But this actually does happen in a cycling race.”

The Dutchman also called out the UCI, cycling’s governing body, for a lack of action following Tarling’s death, suggesting that the teams themselves may need to take a leading role again instead if nothing more significant comes from the top.

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“Neither UCI President David Lappartient nor anyone else from the umbrella organizations stands up and says: ‘Yes, but wait a minute, we really need to get together now and think about how we are going to prevent this from happening in the future?’,” said Plugge.

“Maybe we as teams need to take responsibility for safety in races ourselves again. I don’t know, but the lack of anger about what has happened again is very disappointing to me.”

As is common at smaller races, the Volta a Portugal was utilising a rolling road closure system, instead of course-wide closures to the race route seen at Grand Tours. Cars getting onto the course shouldn’t happen, with police and volunteers marshalling the course throughout the convoy, but there have been several instances of it happening in recent years.

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Just a week after Tarling’s death, Maeve Plouffe revealed how a puncture left her “less than two minutes down,” on the Tour of Britain Women peloton, but with “cars from the general public coming at me from all directions, including one that nearly hit me on a roundabout”, bringing the safety discussions into full focus once again.

In 2025, several teams quit the Étoile de Bessèges after two cars entered onto the closed race route on different days, one of which caused a crash, leading to a much smaller WorldTour presence at the race back in February of this year.

Two years prior at the Tour Féminin des Pyrénées, the final stage was cancelled after a series of dangerous incidents on the opening day, including oncoming traffic on the race route and parked cars blocking roads elsewhere, and a rider protest on stage 2.

Are circuit races the answer to greater safety?

Plugge posed the question of whether racing for hundreds of kilometres on public roads is even possible anymore. The answer to which would mean more closed-circuit races in and around cities, akin to those which are regularly seen at the UCI World Championships road races.

While the spectacle of professional bike racing has long been about traversing hundreds of kilometres from point A to point B, it’s hard to argue against the improvements in safety it would likely bring, with cars getting onto the closed circuits likely becoming impossible and much easier to marshal – not requiring as much personnel.

“We have already indicated to the authorities, organizers, and teams: if cycling from A to B over public roads over 200 kilometers is no longer feasible, then we must ride laps of 15, 20, or 25 kilometers,” said Plugge.

“Provided those routes can be secured 100%. Ultimately, it is simply about our riders. They must be certain that they can race on a safe course.”

The Dutch team boss has long been one of the players pushing for change when it comes to the model and organisation of cycling as a whole, with Plugge spearheading much of the OneCycling project which dominated discussions before the UCI rejected the idea in June last year.

While that attempt to revolutionise the sport didn’t materialise, Plugge still doesn’t see the current format of racing being maintained even as soon as potentially five years’ time. Perhaps closed circuit racing will become the answer, if the safety considerations aren’t taken more seriously, especially after events like Tarling’s tragic death.

“We are standing here at the start of the Vuelta a España in Monaco. The area around Nice and Monaco is full of traffic. We need to think now about how we can still organize a cycling race here in five years. What will our sport look like in five years?” he said.

“Will we still be able to drive 200 kilometers from A to B? Probably not, because then you would need a thousand traffic controllers. Whereas, if you ride laps of 20km… Everyone is super enthusiastic about the World Cycling Championships being held on a local circuit. And rightly so! Because that is at least manageable.”

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