Vincenzo Nibali hoped to win the 2018 Tour de France; now he can only hope to sue it.
The Italian and his Bahrain-Merida squad are moving forward with legal action against the Tour based on the poor safety precautions in the race.
Nibali crashed on a narrow section of road near the top of Alp d’Huez where drunken fans crowded the road and smoke flares made visibility difficult. A fan’s camera strap hooked his handlebars and Niabli went down, fracturing a vertebra and crashing out of the race.
It’s going to be an interesting situation. Team manager Brent Copeland is suing A.S.O., arguably the most powerful player in the sport, for damages. The race organization runs the Tour, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, Paris-Roubaix, La Flèche Wallonne and even the Tour of California.
Copeland’s legal action is not going to make A.S.O. very happy. Bahrain-Merida has a WorldTour license so they have automatic invites to those races but A.S.O. will open their book and put a big, fat black mark next to Copeland’s squad. They don’t like being pushed around, not by the UCI and certainly not by the teams.
That doesn’t seem to faze Copeland who is moving full speed ahead. “We are still going ahead with the lawyers, it takes time. You have to get pictures of the events, we have them with the policemen standing quite close to the accident and they weren’t stopping the fans,” Copeland told Cycling Weekly. “We have to put a case together and send it forward. But neither ASO nor the UCI has contacted us. It’s either the insurance money or we will make a case about what happened.”
Nibali called the atmosphere on Alp d’Huez a “circus” filled with drunk people trying to get on TV. “It’s craziness. I was immobile on the ground with such pain. It’d take nothing and maybe I’d have been paralysed,” he told La Gazzetta dello Sport.
We shall see what ultimately happens. This reminds us of last year’s Tour controversy when Peter Sagan was thrown out of the race after he and Mark Cavendish tangled along the barriers. The majority of people believed that Sagan should not have been tossed for supposedly causing Cavendish to crash badly.
Sagan’s Bora-Hansgrohe squad appealed to the UCI after the Tour was over, with the governing body ruling that Sagan was not at fault. However, the damage was done and his team certainly didn’t get any compensation from Le Tour.
It seems likely that there will be lots of hot air and angry quotes but in the end the law suit will accomplish nothing. A.S.O. will announcement a renewed commitment to rider safety, a few more barriers will be added and the race will go on, with or without Nibali.
Le Tour, c’est le Tour.
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