One of 21st century cycling’s longest-standing debates, laid mostly dormant save for a few awakenings in the past few years, is back roaring into life, with powerbrokers taking sides and angry words being exchanged. To ban or to keep race radios, that is the question.
It was midway through the Tour de France – straight out of the political dead cat strategy playbook – that the UCI, cycling’s world governing body who has never quite been happy with race radios ever since they become ubiquitous around 15 years ago, announced that during August’s Vuelta a Burgos and Tour of Poland, in-race communication between team staff and riders would be strictly limited to that old-fashioned thing called talking face-to-face to one another, as opposed to relaying information through their earpieces. The only exception is that on certain days of both races, two riders in the team would be permitted a radio, the trial’s way of working out which is a better solution: no radios for anyone, or two riders who are allowed radios.
This is not the first time the UCI has done this. Pat McQuaid, president of the body for eight years, banned them in 2011, but soon they returned; four years later, the issue remained on the agenda and the discussion table during Brian Cookson's tenure as presidency, but ultimately race radios remained; in 2017, however, they were once again a topic when the current head of the sport, Monsieur 10 jobs David Lappartient, once warned that gamblers could hack race radios, and is now trialling what his predecessors tried so hard to do but ultimately failed to enact: preventing their use, full stop. Regardless of who’s in charge at the UCI, the position has been unmoved and absolute: race radios stymie attacking racing, produce stale tactics, and hand over strategy entirely to the sports directors in the cars behind. The upshot, they claim, is that racing is less entertaining.
And they have their backers within the peloton. Team DSM-Firmenich PostNL’s Romain Bardet, winner of stage one of this year’s Tour de France, said recently that riders just “wait for their command” and that in the absence of race radios, “it keeps the rider much sharper… the human being would have to show up.” His veteran colleague in the peloton, Bauke Mollema, bemoaned that “earpieces cause so much stress… [He’d like] no more team leaders who babble in the ears of riders and tell them to sit at the front.”
With race radios, Anna Kiensenhofer would almost certainly not have won the Tokyo Olympics road race – none of the UCI-organised events, including the Olympics and World Championships, have ever had race radios. Without regular instructions in a rider’s earpiece, it forces, as Bardet argues and Marianne Vos agrees, the riders to think instinctively. And without riders constantly telling their bosses who’s trying to infiltrate a break, it’s a return to junior racing, where tactics are revised and adapted out on the road, and not in the air-conditioned cars a kilometre behind.
Anna Kiesenhofer stayed away at the Olympics in part due to a lack of radios
Most riders, however, don’t side with Bardet and Mollema. They claim that information given on the race radio is not only essential for team tactics, but for race safety, with DSs signposting approaching hazards in the road, and riders relaying incidents such as mechanicals or crashes. This was seen most recently at the Paris Olympic when the men’s road race winner Remco Evenepoel suffered a puncture in the final four kilometres and was unable to call for assistance. Just a few months earlier, Visma-Lease a Bike’s Attila Valter said that the banning of race radios “would be fun and games until you lose a Grand Tour because you can’t communicate to your team car that you’ve had a crash or a puncture.”
So it was no surprise that his manager, Richard Plugge, was the one who angrily stirred the pot during the Tour of Poland, the second race of the Marmite trial, claiming that “it was chaos today without radios… it turns the race into a complete farce”. His specific anger related to a post on X (formerly Twitter) that showed a rider in a ditch on the side of the road without medical or team support around him. It did not appear that the rider's fall had gone unnoticed as the X post suggested.
Uncharacteristically dipping his toe into the public spat was Lappartient, swapping his swooning of Emmanuel Macron and the IOC’s outgoing president Thomas Bach (the man he harbours ambitions of replacing, possibly as soon as March 2025), and claiming that Plugge was “caught in the act of fake news!” He added: “Today’s crashes at the Tour de Pologne have nothing to do with the absence of radios and you know it… You want to keep the radios on to give instructions, not for safety.”
Both opposing views claim that they have safety at the forefront of their thinking, but a cynic would allege that this is a ruse: ultimately, one side, led by the UCI, want to reduce the influence of team staff during the racing, and the other side, the big teams especially, want to maintain their control over what action happens on the road. They shudder at the thought of their riders having to make decisions for themselves.
David Lappartient has maintained the UCI's position of getting rid of radios
The safety aspect, however, should not be ignored. It is plausible that a situation could arise in that an injured rider, devoid of a radio, cannot relay to their team that they have crashed. There is, though, probably a solution to this: a system of one-way communication, in which the rider can speak to the team car but not vice versa. With regards to general safety communication, there are many proponents of a neutral radio service informing the entire peloton at the same time of upcoming hazards and dangers, and maybe even updating them on the race’s dynamics, such as how big an advantage the breakaway has.
When we’ll have the results of the trial is unclear, but what is already known is that the UCI is digging its heels into the ground over an issue it has always been staunchly against. “Let’s continue working together!” Lappartient asked of Plugge. Only he knows as well as anyone that there’s no such thing as unity and common ground in cycling; there has, and always will be, rifts, and irreconcilable disagreements. If there is one certainty in all this it’s the death knell seemingly sounding on the Tour de France’s two-season-old TV broadcast of team radios, a project that Visma, ironically or not, pulled out of towards the end of this year’s race, saying that “we can’t trust the process.” The race radio debate is once again awake and active, drawing new fissures of discontent. Which side are you on?
