Thomas De Gendt has played down the significance of his spectacular tyre blowout in the UAE Tour, where the Belgian’s mishap and subsequent crash sparked a wealth of speculation over the potential risks of a hookless rim system for tyres.
Lotto-Dstny had already insisted that they were “100% within the rules” and that their wheel setup was entirely UCI-compliant. Manufacturer Zipp also issued a statement saying that the impact with an object was to blame, rather than the rim and tyre combination.
De Gendt himself concurred with that interpretation of events when he spoke with Cyclingnews at the Volta a Catalunya, where he is gunning for one last stage win.
“I don’t know how it happened, it just did. But the wheel was very damaged,” De Gendt said. “Zipp has the wheel to investigate, they did this, and their investigation said it was because of a rock or something on the road.
“After the stage I saw the damage and it was not just damage from hitting the road, it was really damaged from hitting something, although I never saw anything.
“Also with the crash, some parts [of the wheel] are a bit missing. But it’s not like that the tyre came off by itself, it had to be because of something.
“Their investigation said it was something on the road that I hit and that made the wheel not really collapse, but get damaged enough hard enough to make the tyre go off.”
De Gendt confirmed that he was going to continue using the tyres. “Well, we’ve used them for the last three years and we’ve never had issues,” he said.
“It’s the first time I’ve had something like this. We know that if we have a flat tyre, you don’t have ride 10 kilometres with it because the tyre will go off.
“But we are also sure that they won’t put anything on the market that is unsafe. So this is probably just a one-time failure, because of the big force that made the rim just explode.”
De Gendt also pointed out that there had been similar events in the past, although the UAE crash was far more widely publicised. “Sometimes it happens if you jump on the pavement and you hit the edge, your wheel explodes and you also crash and you also get the tyre off.
“Like what the mechanic says to me, even if you had tubular wheels it would still have come off because of the big force of hitting something.”
Catalunya
Now in his final season as a professional, the 37-year-old is concentrating on taking one last stage in the Volta a Catalunya, which he already named pre-season…
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