{"id":522948,"date":"2026-04-10T07:52:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T07:52:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/522948\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T07:52:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T07:52:12","slug":"kiaan-watts-new-zealand-cyclist-banned-for-punching-rival-in-head-during-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/522948\/","title":{"rendered":"Kiaan Watts: New Zealand cyclist banned for punching rival in head during race"},"content":{"rendered":"

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New Zealand<\/a> cyclist<\/a> Kiaan Watts has been handed a 25-day ban by world cycling’s governing body, the UCI.<\/p>\n

It follows an incident where he punched a fellow competitor during a race last month.<\/p>\n

The 24-year-old was captured on video footage striking Dutch cyclist Marijn Maas in the head during the Salverda Bouw Ster van Zwolle race in the Netherlands<\/a> on 7 March.<\/p>\n

The UCI confirmed that Watts had accepted the sanction, which will see him suspended until 2 May. <\/p>\n

In a statement, the governing body said: \u201cKiaan Watts will serve a period of suspension of 25 days, with the one-day suspension imposed on the rider by his team on March 8 being credited from the period of suspension.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following the altercation, Watts issued an apology on social media, attributing his actions to the \u201cheat of the moment\u201d.<\/p>\n

His NSN Development Team also released a statement, expressing regret. <\/p>\n

“The team expects that its riders race in a sporting and professional manner at all times and wishes to extend an apology to Marijn Maas, the BEAT CC p\/b Saxo team, race organisers, and the UCI Commissaires,” the team stated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":522949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-522948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/522949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}