One of the biggest headlines of the past few weeks has surrounded the dramatic pictures of Thomas De Gendt’s bike propped against a barrier at the UAE Tour, its front wheel splashed with sealant, the Vittoria tyre off the rim, and a tyre insert, which began the day inside the tyre, exposed and jammed between the wheel and the fork. So far the thread that connected all those headlines is that no one knew for sure what happened.
Since the crash happened, De Gendt, Zipp, and Vittoria have all confirmed in separate statements that an impact was at fault, citing an errant rock as the guilty party, but so far, there’s been no evidence.
Today, that changes. After in-house analysis, Zipp has shared images with Cyclingnews, showing the wheel in question dramatically damaged with a sizeable crack across the tyre bed.
Upon seeing these images, our thoughts returned to the aforementioned shots of De Gendt’s bike. Despite all the furore and ongoing debate, there was very little discussion of a damaged rim, and surely a crack of this size would have been noticeable.
So we redownloaded the high-res version, and after applying a bit of basic Photoshop brightness adjustment, it’s clear that the same crack was there for the world to see all along.
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Zipp also shared that “The engineers have reviewed the wheel in question and it was clearly a result of a significant impact. When you hit something hard enough to destroy the structure of a rim, the tyre is going to come off.”
This is a sentiment shared by Jake Pantone, VP of Product and Brand for Zipp’s competitor, Enve Composites. He told Cyclingnews “broken wheels can’t be expected to retain a tyre. Tubes, tubeless with hooks, tubeless without hooks, and tubulars will all throw the tyre if the rim is no longer load bearing or breaks through the dimensionally critical tyre bed.”
As we’ve seen in previous incidents, namely in Annemiek Van Vleuten’s freak World Championships crash, cracked rims don’t tend to hold onto the tyre very well, and typically, that marks the end of the discussion.
Of course, this doesn’t explicitly prove that the Belgian hit a rock before going down as…
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