A new road? A year on from 2024 mass crash, the latest edition of Itzulia Basque Country gets underway

When the riders of the 2025 Itzulia Basque Country come off the team buses and head for the stage 1 time trial start ramp this afternoon, much of the attention will, logically, be on its strikingly unusual location - Vitoria's Buesa Arena indoor sports arena. 

But an unconventional start location certainly won't be the only atypical element to this year's race. After a terrible mass crash on stage 4 of the 2024 Itzulia saw 12 riders abandon simultaneously, with Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike), Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep), Jay Vine (UAE Team Emirates) and Steff Cras (Total Energies) amongst those suffering major injuries and quitting, what happened last April has yet to disappear completely from pro cycling's rear-view mirror.

As recently as February in an interview during the Volta ao Algarve, Vingegaard spoke about how he would not let his children be professional bike riders. He laid the blame for crashes jointly on riders – "Too many race as if there are no brakes on a bike" – and in the case of the Itzulia, partly on organisers "for sending us down a road with tree roots underneath it."

The immediate consequences of the crash, on a fast downhill, were shocking, even for experienced sports directors. "I don't recollect having seen something like this on such a scale and with such good riders," Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe's Patxi Vila, whose rider Primož Roglič was forced to abandon whilst leading a race he had already won twice, told Cadena Ser in April last year.

"A situation almost all the favourites of the race end up going home is very unusual.

"You look around and you realise how bad the crash had been. Although I have to say it happened on a bend that wasn't that fast or that dangerous."

The fallout for the biggest-name riders is almost too well-known to be worth revisiting and logically dominated many of the headlines. Yet without in any way understating how terrible they were, it's worth highlighting that lesser-known pros,  like Cras, for example also had what he told Belgian media was a 'brush with death' on the sweeping downhill of the Orlaeta climb. In the Belgian's case, this took the form of a collapsed lung, broken ribs and fractured vertebrae, and a recovery period that lasted two months, with his first race back, the Tour of Slovenia in mid-June.

Fast forward 12 months and back to that Vitoria sports palace time trial, and an unusually high dearth of 'top names' for the 2025 Itzulia is clear. Neither Evenepoel, Vingegaard nor Primoz Roglič have returned after they abandoned on stage 4 last year, nor - given his current Flanders-Roubaix bid - is Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) on the start list. 

But the lack of household names from south of the Pyrenees is also noticeable, with neither of the top Spanish up-and-coming racers, Carlos Rodríguez (Ineos Rodríguez) nor Pogačar's teammate Juan Ayuso, taking part. Rodríguez is recovering from a crash in the UAE Tour whilst Ayuso and Basque star Mikel Landa (Soudal-Quick Step) are both training and building for the Giro d'Italia.

While these stars are not present for the 2025 Itzulia, and the Cat.3 Orlaeta descent will not be revisited this year either, WorldTour teams and the remainder of the peloton are not staying away. Cras, for one, is down to take part in this year's race, and so too are a huge number of the riders who were involved or witnesses to last year's mass crash, but who luckily did not have to abandon. While some will be very keen to come back to Itzulia and others less so, the majority will likely be present simply because at the end of the day, a bike race is a bike race and competing where the team decides they go is what they are paid to do.

"There are no star names, but it'll be a very nice, fun race. We're going to have a good time," Javier Riaño - the race director who took full charge of Itzulia after Julian Eraso, the longstanding president of organising company OCETA, stood down in December - told El Correo newspaper this March. (El Correo also reported that Itzulia is planning to introduce new safety measures for 2025, but no information has yet been forthcoming from the race organisation regarding exactly what they are, with Cyclingnews call to the Itzulia press office last week so far going unanswered.)

The bigger issues

In any case, the bigger underlying question regarding that horrendous crash of the 2024 Itzulia is not just about Itzulia 2025, rather it affects plenty of different events, argues EF Education-EasyPost sports director Tom Southam.

"If it had gone down the same [2024 crash] descent again, there would have been a degree of consternation, because the place is proven, with those tree roots [under the road] to be unsafe," Southam, a former pro who was present as a DS in last year's Itzulia and will be again this year, tells Cyclingnews.

"But I don't think the organisers went out of their way to make it unsafe. They do what they can to make it safe and crashes can happen anywhere. It's not a specifically 'Basque' problem.

"So there is a sense that these things can happen. But generally speaking, I don't think the riders will be riding Pais Vasco this year feeling apprehensive because of the crash there last year."

Southam estimates around 40% of the 2024 Itzulia peloton will be present this year, so "there's a constant cycle of change going on anyway, and it won't be a strong narrative inside many teams here, unless there was somebody specifically affected."

As Southam points out, the 2019 Tour de Pologne continued after Belgian Bjorg Lambrecht died mid-race in a chance accident, and he recalls many riders were seriously affected by it on an emotional level. "So if somebody did have an issue, I'd hope they'd be able to speak to myself or to somebody in the team, whatever support network there is. But I don't think it's going to be an overarching theme for the race."

Southam insists, in any case, that he thinks it's wrong to focus overly on a specific event, no matter how terrible it may have been, without looking at the bigger picture and perspective about what could be done in the sport to try to avoid such accidents.

"It's not a Basque crash, it's not an Itzulia crash, it's a crash that happened in one race. There was a bad crash in Dwars door Vlaanderen last year, it wrote off the Classics season for a lot of people but everybody went back to that race.

"But I don't think it's a Basque issue, I think it's a cycling issue. It's widespread across countries, across routes, across all types of cyclists."

Southam also claimed that the way racing is changing, in general, is having a definite knock-on effect on the likelihood of crashes, citing another scenario from last year's Itzulia, when on stage 3 - the day before the crash - no break was allowed to stick by the peloton at all because so many teams wanted to go for the day's win.

"By that point the race hadn't had a defining climb, so it was all quite tight overall and then there was always a GC person in the break, so the break would never go. But at the same time, 15 teams were looking for a stage win because they couldn't win the GC.

"So that made the race go faster on the downhills on a day when the break could have gone and the rest could have been rolling down there But they weren't. But I don't know how you dial back on that dynamic, because right there are less races to win for more teams. And that's just building and building and building." The pressure of the points system and risk of relegation from the World Tour, Southam says, is also forcing teams to race differently. 

"It makes it more strained. The way people are racing, the speed they are racing - they're going for the last 10 points in the day. If you're a rider and you can finish the season with 350 UCI points, you're more valuable than somebody who hasn't got them. So those guys aren't sitting up, they're still racing - it's just a huge cycle of speeding things up."

All of these points, regardless of how much or little they directly affect crashes, go far beyond the Itzulia, Southam says. On the other, according to the local media at least, memories of the 2024 crash in the 2025 Itzulia would be hard to avoid.  As one leading Spanish cycling website, joanseguidor.com put it when this year's route was published a couple of months ago, "It will be impossible not to recall last year's crash in the 2025 Itzulia," and as El Correo said recently, "For all the different authorities, the serious crash from last year on the descent of Olaeta has not disappeared from view."

The Itzulia route may not pass down the exact same descent then, but as Southam says, it's worth keeping in mind that plenty of other races use the same roads. So perhaps rather than focus on one event, it's worth bearing in mind that all too often, the issues of last year's stage 4 of the Itzulia are mirrored elsewhere in the sport.