Finlay Tarling’s tragic death at the Volta a Portugal last week caused an outpouring of grief and tributes flooded in for the 19-year-old. The young British rider was hit by a non-race vehicle on stage eight of the race on Friday, and died due to his injuries.
Tarling was a promising young cyclist, who grew up on the British racing scene that is Cycling Weekly’s bread and butter, which makes this loss feel even more personal; he was interviewed by my colleagues, featured in the magazine, and would have competed against many of our readers in the time trials he regularly took part in. The news was heartbreaking, as it is every time we have to report on something like this, and it is always difficult to know what to say or do.
It is too early to talk of a legacy, but over £50,000 has already been raised through GoFundMe for a project supporting young Welsh riders, showing the love that the sport and the world of cycling had for Tarling. However, the legacy of tragedy should also be ensuring that something like this never happens again.
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News editor at Cycling Weekly, Adam brings his weekly opinion on the goings on at the upper echelons of our sport. This piece is part of The Leadout, a newsletter series from Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. As ever, email adam.becket@futurenet.com – should you wish to add anything, or suggest a topic.
Tarling is not the first rider to die while racing, but he should be one of the last. As Jacob Whitehead reported in The Athletic, eight riders have died in crashes since 2023 in elite or development races, more than the previous 13 years combined. Yet everything feels the same. I won’t list them all, but Gino Mäder’s death at the 2023 Tour de Suisse felt like it should have been the watershed moment, as did Muriel Furrer’s death at the 2024 Road World Championships in Zürich, but they were not. This accident must become that moment.
There has been righteous anger, with a statement from the riders’ union, the CPA, saying: “It is not right that a young athlete’s life should end this way, and we are furious that even today it is still not possible to prevent such serious accidents.”
It should never have happened. This was not a racing incident like a touch of wheels, a poor piece of course design, or a dangerous section. This was caused by a driver being present on the course, heading the opposite way. There is a police investigation going on now to determine what happened and why, but it feels obvious that this was an avoidable situation.
The driver was going against the race route and hit Tarling as he descended, trying to catch up with the peloton at the UCI 2.1 race after being distanced. Like other smaller races, the roads used are not fully locked down, but instead subject to a rolling road closure. The driver of the vehicle which hit Tarling reportedly drove onto the course after the bunch had passed, but not the full convoy.
There have been warnings about cars getting on to the course at other races. Nine teams left the Étoile de Bessèges in France early last year after multiple cars were driven onto the course, while in 2023, the CIC-Tour Féminin International des Pyrénées ended early after repeated problems with vehicles entering the race bubble. With the sheer amount of cars around, and with the race constantly on the move, it is clearly tricky to lock down areas, but closed roads are a necessity for safe racing. Fixing this should be a priority. It is not enough to hope for the best; preventing dangerous situations from occurring in the first place is a must.
The SafeR initiative was set up by the UCI following Mäder’s death, but concrete changes to our sport remain lacking. So far, the UCI has acted on the width of handlebars and the screen size of GPS head units. While money from the initiative’s budget has been ring-fenced to fight a legal battle with SRAM over gear sizes, as Cyclingnews reported in February, serious accidents and deaths continue in cycling. This time around, there has been a message of condolence from cycling’s governing body, but no communication over what will happen next, to stop tragedies like last week’s happening again.
Clear communication and action is needed, before another needless death occurs. There is inherent risk in cycling, but any additional danger can be reduced. A non-race vehicle should never be let onto the course. That feels like a good place to start.
This piece is part of The Leadout, the offering of newsletters from Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.
If you want to get in touch with Adam, email adam.becket@futurenet.com.
