In this cycling news roundup, a wave of crashes is shaping — and distorting — the 2026 cycling season, from a chaotic Giro d’Italia opening to a string of earlier wipeouts felling Pedersen, Jorgenson, van Aert, and many more. Meanwhile, Paula Blasi delivers the breakout story of the spring with an improbable La Vuelta Femenina victory, Wout van Aert flexes at Marly Grav gravel race, and Filippo Fiorelli wins Tro-Bro Léon in style.
TOP STORY
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Crashes Riddle Initial Tour Stages (and the 2026 Season)
RACE NEWS
- Blasi Bombs the Angliru: Cycling’s Newest Superstar Rewrites the Script
- Wout Goes Full Beast Mode at Marly Grav
- Fiorelli Rides to Tro-Bro-Solo in the Breton Badlands
TEAM, RIDER AND CYCLING NEWS
- Your Input: YES Seixas Should Ride the Tour (Barely)
VIDEO
- Visit Italy’s Premier Bike Lodging: Hotel Dory
Crashes Riddle Initial Tour Stages (and the 2026 Season)
It looked like a land mine had been placed in the roadway: just as the Giro stage 1 sprint was taking shape, the peloton practically exploded. (Crash footage at 7:00.)
But the following day’s crash was actually worse.
The victim list revealed that an overall competition that had already been largely uncompetitive was now laughably so, with outside threats Buitrago, Gee-West, Vine and Yates all going down and either abandoning the race, or at least seeing their GC chances entirely diminished.
While particularly catastrophic, the stage 2 crash was only the latest in a 2026 litany. The crash season began even before the road season kicked off, when Wout van Aert fractured his ankle in a cyclocross race. From there we had the Kangaroo Collision at the Tour Down Under, which took Vine out with a fractured wrist — yes, the Giro wipeout was his second race-ending crash of the young season — as well as wrecks that took down (deep breath…) Mads Pedersen, Marc Hirschi, Matteo Trentin, Stefan Küng, Matteo Jorgenson, Ben Swift, Jan Christen, Michal Kwiatkowski, Rory Townsend, Tobias Foss, Timo de Jong, Michael Matthews, Maxim Van Gils, and Luka Mezgec.
To mention just some of this season’s victims.
That’s not even listing the crashes that didn’t result in race-terminating injuries, such as Tadej Pogačar’s and Mathieu van der Poel’s tumble at Milan-Sanremo.
Thinking that a significant crash per race seems almost assumed, I did a bit of searching, and yes, the rate of accidents in WorldTour races has increased in recent years, perhaps dramatically.
Why? we all naturally ask; the reasons would seem to range from increased speeds and added road furniture to less-experienced-big-engined riders entering the pro peloton (um…Vine?) and even — paradoxically — more teams working to keep their GC favorites at the front of the field to avoid crashing, thereby creating more competition in very limited space.
(An economist-friend once wrote a paper making the case that changing the one-kilometer rule to three kilometers resulted in more crashes.)
Where is all this headed? I assume that top riders will compete less frequently, until most have calendars resembling those of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named: maybe a warm-up race or two, then the Tour, then…nothing else. (Of course, he had different reasons for avoiding competition.)
Now that I’ve invoked — ahem — Lance Armstrong, I’ll credit him for a thoughtful point: If 5% of all NFL players suffered such severe injuries on a single Sunday that they were carted off in ambulances, we’d see congressional hearings.
I sure hope we can figure out a way to address this pretty evident increase in crashing; I’m becoming afraid it’s going to ruin our beloved sport.
RACE NEWS
Blasi Bombs the Angliru: Cycling’s Newest Superstar Rewrites the Script
Not long ago I had this idea for a reader poll: Who had the best spring? The options would be: Pogačar, for having won nearly anything; van Aert, for his career-defining Paris-Roubaix victory; Eddy Merckx, whose legacy was saved — for now — when Pogačar didn’t win P-R — and Paula Blasi. (We ended up instead going with What was your favorite spring classic?)
Consider: just last fall, while her now-rivals were racing at Worlds in Rwanda, Blasi was lining up at local Spanish races, trying to figure out if cycling was even her thing. She’d only picked up the sport after a running injury in early 2024 forced her off the track.
Now? She’s wearing the red jersey of La Vuelta Femenina. Boy that escalated quickly.
The final three stages of the 2026 race told a story worth savoring. Stage 5, a relatively flat 119km dash from León to Astorga, belonged to SD Worx-Protime, as Mischa Bredewold accidentally outsprinted her own lead-out, surging past Lotte Kopecky in the closing metres for the win. Blasi watched, stayed calm, and saved her legs for what was coming.
Stage 6 to Les Praeres saw Anna van der Breggen deliver a dominant summit finish for the stage win and the red jersey, with Blasi hanging on just six seconds back — close enough to keep her dreams alive, but far enough that most had already written her eulogy.
Then came the Angliru. Four kilometers from the finish, Van der Breggen cracked, and Blasi seized the moment, riding away from the overnight leader on the steepest ramps of the notorious climb. Petra Stiasny, far out of GC contention, ultimately soloed to the stage win, but Blasi’s second place was more than enough to clinch the overall.
Blasi started the final day 18 seconds behind Van der Breggen and finished with a 24-second cushion — a complete reversal. She only joined a cycling club two years ago. My reader poll response? Blasi.
Final GC Results, 12th Vuelta España Feminina — courtesy of Pro Cycling Stats
Wout Goes Full Beast Mode at Marly Grav
Watching the highlights of Marly Grav, a hot (and surely controversial) take came to mind: The U.S. pioneered gravel racing — but Europe has improved on it.
Gasp! But witness the tiny roads ribboning bucolic landscapes, fans lining stretches of the main race in what was billed as “three days of enjoying the spirit of gravel” — and the Paris-Roubaix champ ripping past age groupers in the closing kilometers.
Such was the scene on the outskirts of Valkenburg, where Roubaix played with his “rivals” — certainly not chumps, but the rider in the World Champion’s jersey whom he rode away from was world gravel champ Florian Vermeersch, not Tadej Pogačar. Van Aert had said he was there just wanting to have fun — and indeed, it looked pretty fun when he torched the field with 20-plus kilometers to go. Whereas van Aert appeared positively elated when he finished ahead of Pogačar in the Roubaix velodrome, this time his face read matter-of-fact: Happy, sure, but…what if he hadn’t won?
On the women’s side, (gravel) world champion Lorena Wiebes had a slightly tougher time with it though won her sprint finish in convincing fashion.
The Marly Grav course wound through familiar territory for gravel world champion Vermeersch, partly retracing the unpaved roads of last autumn’s World Championships right here in South Limburg. Poetic stuff — and Vermeersch was very much in the mix early, part of a sharp seven-man front group alongside van Aert, Pascal Eenkhoorn, Niels Vandeputte, Jonathan Vervenne, Rick Ottema, and German wildcard Georg Egger.
Van Aert toyed with the race once, testing the waters before letting the group come back together. But when the real acceleration came — on a steep forest climb, trademark Van Aert brutality — it was simply unanswerable. Vermeersch saw it coming and could do absolutely nothing. Vandeputte sprinted to second in a group of walking wounded, Ottema grabbed third.
Hmmm…the European Gravel Championships date in Houffalize on August 30th suddenly looks very interesting indeed.
Fiorelli Rides to Tro-Bro-Solo in the Breton Badlands
In the race that was gravel before gravel was cool, Filippo Fiorelli of Visma | Lease a Bike has taken the honors at Tro Bro Léon 2026, launching a perfectly-timed solo attack with three kilometers left and holding on grimly — gloriously — to cross the line alone. Alexis Renard (Cofidis) claimed second in the sprint for the chasers, with Lewis Askey (NSN) rounding out the podium in third.
The 202-kilometer Breton monster lived up to every last bit of its fearsome reputation. Unpaved ribinoù paths punishing through the final 70km — 2,000 meters of climbing despite the relatively short distance; this is no race for the faint-hearted. Early on, a six-man break featuring Daniel Cavia, Nil Gimeno, Sergio Romeo, Valentin Ferron, Joel Nicolau, and Pierre Thierry hit the road, but the peloton had other ideas, swallowing the last survivor, Romeo, at 67km to go.
Jenthe Biermans and Alexys Brunel injected some fire with a counter, but Uno-X Mobility kept the tempo honest and reeled them back in. Then the fireworks really began: Axel Zingle lit the fuse for Visma, Per Strand Hagenes launched at 33km out, and a dangerous five-man move formed with Fred Wright, Benoit Cosnefroy, Askey, and Paul Lapeira. The pursuers closed the gap late — like, heart-racingly late — but Fiorelli had been biding his time. He attacked, carved out a slim buffer, and didn’t look back. His first win in Dutch colors, and an absolute beauty.
Top Ten — 43rd Tro-Bro Léon, courtesy of Pro Cycling Stats
TEAM, RIDER AND CYCLING NEWS
Your Input: YES Seixas Should Ride the Tour (Barely)
It was a sweet enough video that we’re going to drop it in below — again — but it wasn’t entirely persuasive.
The homespun video notwithstanding, a Seixas-slim majority of you voted that the Frenchboy/man should wait — “get more miles in his legs” — before entering the Tour de France.
I actually heard from just one of you, who agrees with me: We’re in a new age; careers are shorter, the money is bigger, and Seixas already rides like someone with many, many thousands of miles in his legs.
Looks like we’ll have to wait until this summer — or until many summers afterwards — to get our final answer.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
“J’ai quelque chose à vous annoncer…”
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— DECATHLON CMA CGM TEAM (@decathloncmacgm) May 4, 2026
PEZ VIDEO
With the Giro d’Italia upon us, let’s revisit Richard’s review of Hotel Dory, one of Italy’s premier bike hotels, located in Riccione on the Adriatic Coast.
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The post EUROTRASH: Are Crashes Ruining the Giro — and WorldTour Racing? appeared first on PezCycling News.
