The director of the CIC-Tour Feminin International des Pyrénées has criticised the participating riders after the event was cancelled by the UCI ahead of Sunday’s final stage due to safety concerns.
After Friday’s opening stage was blighted by a series of dangerous incidents, including oncoming traffic on the race route and parked cars blocking roads, the peloton held a protest on stage 2, effectively neutralising the race until the final climb up Hautacam, where Marta Cavalli (FDJ-Suez) took victory and the leader’s jersey.
Multiple teams opted to pull out ahead of Sunday’s final stage due to those safety issues, and the UCI later cancelled the remainder of the race following consultation with the organisers, the CPA and the commissaires.
Although the decision to cancel the event was taken by the UCI, race director Pascal Baudron reserved his ire for the riders who had outlined their concerns about the dangers they faced on the opening stage.
“What’s happening is that the girls have demands that don’t match their level,” Baudron said on Sunday morning, according to La Nouvelle République. “They think they’re on the Tour de France and that all the roads have to be closed, that everything has to be locked down. But in France, we can’t do that.”
Following the formal cancellation of the race, Baudron continued to focus his criticism on the riders, claiming they were “sawing off the branch they’re sitting on.”
“They’ll be able to cry the day there’s no race anymore, and that’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “Quite honestly, I don’t think it’s worth organising a race to see all those months of effort ruined for the whims of spoiled children. And I’m thinking of all the volunteers who work so hard. It’s catastrophic for morale.”
Speaking to La République des Pyrénées, co-organiser Elisabeth Chevanne-Brachet acknowledged that there had been concerns raised about the opening stage of the race, but she insisted that there had been no issues on stage 2 to Hautacam. This was the second edition of the Tour des Pyrénées, with last year’s inaugural event won by Krista Doebel-Hickok.
“The idea of this race was to give visibility to women’s racing, to provide a mountainous race that doesn’t exist elsewhere on the calendar and to prepare riders for the Tour de France Femmes,” said Chevanne-Brachet, who added that the organisation had unsuccessfully attempted to run the final stage under the aegis of the French Cycling…
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