It has been 725 days since Swiss junior rider Muriel Furrer died after crashing during her home 2024 UCI Road World Championships, having been unattended for a full 82 minutes because she was hidden in the brush. It has been 40 days since Finlay Tarling was killed when a van drove onto the course at the Volta a Portugal and hit him head-on. Pro cycling, as a workplace, has a massive safety problem.
A simple system of tracking riders using global positioning system (GPS) units might have prevented Furrer’s death, but the only tracking system in use at the time was in the men’s WorldTour for the commercialisation of rider power, speed and heart rate data.
After the tragedy, the UCI acknowledged the pressing need for a better safety net, and implemented their own tracking system in the World Championships in Rwanda last year. Now, they are expected to roll out new regulations for GPS tracking at the Management Committee meeting in Montreal this week.
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For the President of the main riders’ union (the CPA), Adam Hansen, more widespread tracking of riders cannot come soon enough, but there is a distinct lack of unity among teams on the details.
“It seems like it’s becoming more important every day, especially after Finlay Tarling,” Hansen tells Cyclingnews.
“Trackers would have avoided this because trackers will see when riders have no protection. For example, in his scenario, he was riding without a police motorbike or any organiser in front of him.
“If this had been seen on a screen that there was no police bike, this could have been very quickly relayed to the race regulator [who could have announced] ‘Rider 81, three minutes back, no protection, send someone there.'”
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The UCI has practically begged stakeholders to come to an agreement on a tracking system. In March, the UCI sent a letter to stakeholders that emphasised a sense of urgency for implementing GPS tracking.
They sought to reassure stakeholders that they aren’t looking to impose any specific system, but would prioritise one “that allows for open access to providing such services”. The letter stated: “Stakeholders can work on the development of a system or tool with the provider of their choice (organisers, teams, riders).”
After the death of Tarling, the UCI spent a large part of the Pro Cycling Council (PCC) meeting earlier this month on GPS tracking, and in a statement said that “the UCI stressed the urgent need” to put a tracking system in place in the men’s and women’s WorldTour, with phrases such as “in the absence of a joint proposal from the different stakeholder groups” and “stakeholders need to move past any disagreements on certain issues and act together” but rather alarmingly: “safety must never be sacrificed for commercial interests”.
Why are stakeholders raising any objections to a system everyone agrees is badly needed? What commercial interest is sacrificing rider safety?
(To be clear, objections from teams have not stopped GPS tracking from being used, and the UCI regulations were never going to be agreed upon before this year. When teams pulled out of a trial at the women’s Tour de Romandie in 2025, the trial still went ahead. This article highlights the finer points of implementing a tracking system.)
Cyclingnews attempted to speak to Brent Copeland, head of the AIGCP (teams organisation), to better understand the concerns leading to the lack of agreement the UCI mentions, but we were unable to receive comment before the publication of this article.
Hansen gave his perspective from what was discussed in the PCC meetings, which included representatives from the AIGCP, the race organisers’ association (AIOCC) and the UCI, but is not a representative of the teams.
There are already at least three different tracking systems in use in the WorldTour: the Tour de France has one for their broadcast and live race centre, but it’s only for commercial purposes. Teams obviously don’t pay for that. The UCI built another in partnership with Swiss Timing for safety alone last year, and if they impose their system on teams, it might come at a cost to teams.
Then there’s the Velon group, a business venture owned by eight men’s WorldTour teams who built their entire business model around collecting and monetising live rider data. Those eight teams have invested heavily in developing and evolving their live data system over the course of a decade. In 2025, after the deaths of Gino Mäder and Furrer, Velon developed a safety module, ‘SaVe’, that sends riders’ speed and location to a central monitoring station.
At first, Hansen says, there was a concern from teams that the UCI might try impose their system and then commercialise the data.
“The teams did think this at the start – they thought the UCI was going to monetise this,” he says. “But the UCI President said in three PCC meetings that they would never do this; they just want safety trackers on the riders.
“I’m not 100% sure why the teams have not agreed to an open system, because that’s what we all agreed we want.”
An ‘open system’ means that the UCI would collect the data from whatever trackers teams use and be the ones keeping tabs on the riders. “It’s like radios: every team has different radios, and two riders can have two different radios, but all work on the same frequency. We want the same thing for the GPS trackers, where two different teams having two different GPS trackers send the same information.
“The teams are being a little difficult about this because the Velon teams want to use their system,” Hansen says. “We know that Velon wants every team to have their system – that’s for sure. How this all started is the teams are very sensitive on who owns the data of the riders, like heart rate, cadence, and all that. Velon offers that, and they monetise this.”
Ultimately, though, Hansen points to what he thinks is the reason for the disagreement – the idea of using the UCI’s system over Velon’s. “I think it’s more of a bit of a distaste for the Velon teams that they’ve invested so much money into one system over the years, and that it can just be quickly replaced by a different system.”
In 2025, the Tour de Suisse organisers paid Velon CHF 50,000 (£44,941/$60,965) to implement SaVe for the men’s and women’s races, and Velon has been expanding their reach this year to cover more men’s races. They plan to add women’s races next year, too. With the upcoming UCI regulations that will mandate GPS tracking, Velon will have an opportunity to expand further.
Velon CEO Graham Bartlett tells Cyclingnews that they may be charging race organisers for the safety module, but insists they’re not out to make a profit off of it.
“The safety module itself was a reasonable amount of CapEx [capital expenditure – ed.] investment to develop that software,” Bartlett says. “People think it’s easy: ‘OK, you can see where the rider is on a map, there you go, safety!’ That’s not how it works. How do you differentiate between a GPS signal just going off-track a little bit and a rider that’s down a ravine? The software has to be really sophisticated to only throw up the right kind of alerts, and that takes time to develop and invest in.
“We’ve done that. We’re not looking to make money out of that at all. If we charge costs to race organisers to use the system, it’s to recover some costs of the operating staff on the ground.”
When Velon’s system is used for safety tracking, Bartlett says they send three or four people to monitor the system and the incoming data, which costs money.
“We have to pay people; we’re not going to turn this over to a bunch of volunteers,” he said. “The Premier League in the UK launched a monitoring drone system for crowd safety – they are paying somebody else to do it. So we will charge the race organisers for doing this at races, why wouldn’t we? We have to pay people. But to the teams, it’s free.”
(Several teams invest in and fund Velon, but this system would be free to use by all teams in a given race, not just Velon members)
He emphasised that for their safety module, Velon just wants to “get it wide and out there to as many people as possible through the teams”.
What Velon stand to lose if the UCI take away their ability to monitor the whole peloton’s data for safety is the potential to sell their live data to race organisers. With Velon’s GPS trackers already on riders’ bikes, organisers might see the value in getting on board with their commercial venture, too.
“We offer a really good business model to race organisers where they actually end up making money out of the fan engagement data,” Bartlett says.
“Safety we treat as separate. We’re not asking them to repay us for the software investment or start making loads of money on the basis of that. We’d rather focus on making money on the fan engagement stuff, the sports promotion and race promotion, the sponsorships.”
While Velon teams can commercialise riders’ data, non-Velon teams can also work with the organisation, trading their riders’ data for Velon’s social media streams, in return for the team cars receiving live in-race data.
“Now, if a race organiser wants to enrich their broadcast or for us to promote their race with data, then yeah, they pay for that service in the same way they pay for a lot of services,” Bartlett said.
“That’s the essence of the model: free to the teams, free to use, and that’s why we can roll it out now to so many more races, because we’ve got a lot more capacity.”
Is the Velon system up to the task for safety?
By the end of this season, SaVe will have been used in 100 days of racing, Bartlett says, and it’s been successful in detecting several incidents. Before it was fully implemented, the Velon trackers picked up on Alessio Martinelli’s harrowing crash on stage 16 of the 2025 Giro d’Italia, for example.
“We knew exactly where he was,” Bartlett said. “So we could pinpoint those coordinates back to their DSs, back to the team [VF Group-Bardiani CSF-Faizanè], and tell them that’s where he is. The cameras picked him up as well, and there were people by the side of the road, so I’m not claiming any exquisite result in that. It’s just an illustration that that’s where the information goes, that’s what we’re using it for. Primarily, it goes back to the teams.”
In stage 2 of this year’s Giro d’Italia in Albania, the system identified riders who had gone down in a crash and sent that information immediately to the affected riders’ teams. Again, on stage 8, when Fabio Christen (Pinarello-Q36.5) crashed and broke his collarbone, Velon’s system sent an alert and relayed the information to his team.
However, there is no perfect system when it comes to transmitting live data, as cycling fans around the world have experienced when fog or rain interferes with the television signals on a critical climb and we’re all left groaning that we’re missing all of the action. That’s because big races like the Tour de France use a radio frequency system to send data from the ground to aircraft that can then transmit live data to a central location. Sometimes aircraft cannot fly in certain conditions, or the signal can’t get through.
Velon’s system uses existing 4G and 5G cellular networks, but if you’ve ever stood on the side of a mountain in the wilderness, you know there are dead zones.
Hansen suggests that some teams might be concerned about these dead zones with Velon’s system. “The UCI was looking into some type of mesh system, where every tracker has long-range WiFi, and they all connect to each other. Then you might have a drone flying over the top [to collect the data and transmit it to a monitor].”
Even if one device goes offline, it can talk to a nearby tracker and that one can relay the first’s signal. “Once they go back in range, they can relay that ‘Rider disappeared at this location’,” Hansen says. “There might be a little delay when there’s no service, but they’ll definitely get a relay. Where with 4G without the mesh system, you have no idea where that rider went off in that period of time, which could be two minutes – 60kph downhill, that’s two kilometres to look for a rider, which is difficult. With the mesh system, you’ll know exactly where it is, but you’ll find out afterwards exactly where it is.
“There are some teams saying that maybe the Velon system is not good enough, or trackers should have a mesh system. All this is on the table, and we are discussing it. We’re just waiting for the teams to get together. From the four stakeholders, the teams are the least united, which is a problem.”
Bartlett insists that Velon’s system is robust enough.
“We’ve been doing this a long time, and mesh network… We looked at that a lot over the years, and continue to look at it because you can always improve.
“But for the particular environment of bike racing, trying to mesh 180-odd units together, you generate a level of additional complexity. So the way that we address the problem is buffering. The device will trigger as soon as it loses connection, and it will resend all the data that it stored as soon as it’s connected again, which means you can iron out the black spots.”
He adds that there aren’t as many areas without coverage as most people think, because most mobile phones are dependent on a specific network, while Velon’s system can access signal on any available cellular network.
“We have SIM-agnostic eSIMs that will just connect to anything that is available on priority network access, and that means that there’s a lot less of what you would consider to be a black spot.
“That being said, there are, because if you go through a tunnel or the wrong side of a mountain with no masts, you can lose signal. But we know in advance where those positions are, so we pre-plan against it and know what we need to do in the software to smooth that out. But any system where you’re transmitting any signal, whether it’s satellite, RF, LTE, you can lose it at some point. You just have to accept that as a level of tolerance.”
Cyclingnews also tried to speak with the UCI’s sports strategy manager Matthew Knight about the effectiveness of the UCI tracking system but we were unable to do so before the publication of this article.
Riders feel left out of decision-making
What has become clear in the course of this inquiry is that rights to rider data is a very sticky issue. My colleague Matilda Price asked Michał Kwiatkowski (Netcompany Ineos) at the GP de Montréal about the issue, and he highlighted the confusion.
He agreed that GPS tracking should be implemented, but added, “Who has the rights to actually have those devices? That’s a little bit unknown. It would be great to have and share more data with people, but obviously there has to be common sense with actually who is owning it and who is getting the rights and that’s a little bit unknown at the minute.”
He didn’t seem clear that the UCI and Velon are separating safety data from other rider data and that both insist they do not want to monetise safety data. But the Polish rider focused on the distribution of the proceeds from monetising riders’ data, which gives a sense there could be a lack of trust that there is not a plan to do so in combination with the safety tracking.
“Between UCI, the race organisers and the teams, it should be a fair split. Safety is one thing, but you can add to it a lot of gains from TV rights etc., so it’s a difficult subject.”
At the same race, Chris Juul-Jensen (Jayco AlUla) said he felt the riders have not been involved enough. “I suppose if it’s a question of sharing your data, then that’s always a bit of a touchy subject, depending on who you ask and whatnot. I suppose the diplomatic way of going about it would be to ask the riders first before implementing certain rules, which is not often the case.
“I think the rulemakers [the UCI] would get a lot more done in a positive way, with a positive result, if they actually included riders, because I don’t think riders necessarily always just say no to everything, but obviously when you have the feeling that you’re not involved in certain decisions, then you feel excluded.
“We’ve come a long way compared to years ago. There is inclusion, there is a dialogue, Adam Hansen is doing a very good job with the CPA, so I wouldn’t as such be against it [GPS tracking] but you’d want to know what it’s all about.”
Riders are still the ones with their lives on the line, and Hansen was clear that all stakeholders want GPS tracking, but the teams can’t agree on a solution.
“The crazy thing is we could all use the World System. It works; there’s no reason not to. Velon doesn’t want their teams to use it,” Hansen says. “OK, then you’ve got to get your system ready.”
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