Wouter Weylandt
Monday afternoon at work, and like most summer days there is a cycling race going on somewhere in the world. It’s the 10th of May, and the three-week Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) is just getting started. Sitting over the email client on my second monitor is a live video stream of the 3rd stage from ‘Rai’, the Italian national broadcaster. The commentary is garrulous yet engaging, even in a language I barely understand, and alongside it comes a constant stream of updates from two ex-pros riding on the back of chase motorbikes and opinions from the pundits in the temporary studio set by the finish line.
The peloton has just crested the Passo del Bocco and is plunging down towards the sun-drenched Ligurian coast, with the finish close at hand. The climb is tough and the pace high; nearly half the riders have failed to stay with the lead group, and stragglers are taking a few calculated risks on the descent, hoping to catch up before the flat. This is not a terrifying switchback-filled downhill on exposed, weather-worn roads like those race will soon face in the Dolomites and the Alps: the tarmac is smooth, the incline is relatively modest and the course is straight.
As the leaders approach flat roads, the commentator exclaims ‘una caduta!’ and the picture cuts to a scene playing out back on the descent. A camera motorbike has stopped to get a shot of the aftermath, but it’s immediately apparent that this is no routine tumble. Instead of the usual image of a limping rider, road rash showing through holes his shorts, trying to change a broken wheel and get going again, the pictures are of the race doctor leaping out of his gleaming white car and running to attend to a rider lying on the road behind it, hidden from view. A few moments later, the camera locates him, and for perhaps half a second the global audience of millions sees a young man lying completely still on his back, face smashed and disfigured, blood pouring from his nose and mouth. The director cuts away as fast as he can but the image is burned in to my mind, and I can tell from the tone of the commentators that their gut reaction is the same as mine: that man is going to die.
In fact, by the time his bloodied visage appears on my screen, he is already dead. Riding alone at 70km/h, he had glanced over his shoulder to see if there were any riders close by with whom he might co-operate, and drifted slightly too close to the edge of the road. A rider fifty meters behind saw his left pedal strike the end of a low concrete wall and watched as the impact sent him cartwheeling across the road, slamming his face in to the ground. By the time his body came to rest 20 meters further on, his heart had stopped. His name was Wouter Weylandt.
In these times of obsessive blame culture a true accident somehow seems all the more tragic. Wouter’s bike and helmet did not fail, he was not taking huge risks on the descent, the course was not dangerous, the race doctor was on the scene in seconds and he was soon joined by an ambulance and a team doctor with experience in emergency medicine. There are no lessons to be learned, there is no action that can be taken to ensure this never happens again. Random chance remains as cruel as it is unpredictable; when it ends the life of a young man and prevents an unborn child from ever seeing her father, all we can do is grieve, mourn, and try to move on.
I had never witnessed a death in sport until that day. I was not a fan of Formula 1 when Ayrton Senna died during the 1994 San Marino GP, and neither was I aware of the death of Fabio Casartelli at the Tour de France in ‘95 or Andrei Kivilev’s fatal crash in the ‘03 edition of Paris – Nice, which led to helmets becoming mandatory in professional cycling. I have in the past cast a condescending eye over the theatrical reverence NASCAR fans pay to Dale Earnhardt, who passed away after his car was pushed into the wall at Daytona in 2001, but now I feel a degree of empathy. It is hard to watch a man give his life in the service of your entertainment without feeling somewhat responsible.
A public death must necessarily be followed by public mourning. After such a tragedy racing seems at best irrelevant and at worst irresponsible, and while the Tour of Italy could not be cancelled after just three days there was no question of carrying on as though nothing had happened. Tuesday’s stage becomes a 200km wake. Every team takes their turn leading the group slowly and silently past sombre fans holding signs bearing Wouter’s name and his race number, 108, which will never again be worn at the Giro. In the final kilometres the pack slows to a crawl and forward comes Wouter’s closest friend along with the eight remaining members of his team. No pounding music to excite the crowd, no champagne waiting on the podium, no cheering. The nine of them cross the finish line together, arm in arm, and in tears. They all leave the race that evening, and the prize money from the neutralised stage is sent to the widow.
When racing resumes on Wednesday the tension is palpable. The stage traverses several sections of strade bianchi, roads paved with loose white gravel, which enliven the racing action but also increase the chances of a crash. As a group reaches the top of a hill in one of these sections, they pass a soigneur for a Basque team, who is handing out water bottles to members of his squad as they go by. In a moment of confusion, he tries to hand a bottle to a rider from a different team. They tangle, and the rider goes down hard. The commentators fall silent and the soigneur, seeing what has happened, flies in to a panic. He tears at his hair and lets out a wail of anguish that is loud enough to be picked up by the camera moto’s microphones. For a moment, chaos. The commentators are dumbstruck, the terrified soigneur runs over to the downed rider and joins a motorcycle driver in a hasty attempt at resuscitation. Then an arm moves, and eyes open. The commentators breathe again, fans remove their worried hands from over their mouths, and the race goes on.
