Daniele Colli - THE FALL GUY

A high-speed collision with a spectator’s camera cost Daniele Colli his Giro, and almost his career. Procycling meets one of the sport’s most resilient characters and examines the modern day Russian Roulette which is the bunch sprint.

WRITER - Herbie Sykes

Procycling #208, October 2015

On an early August Monday morning in the furnace of the Milanese hinterlands, Procycling is pushed for time. We’re heading to meet a man in a hurry, a cyclist with a plane to catch. Daniele Colli, he of the Giro d’Italia horror crash, is bound for the Tour of Burgos. There he will enact his latest comeback, the latest instalment in the spellbinding tragi-comedy which is his cycling career. Those of you familiar with Colli’s story will likely be fearing the worst at this point and quite rightly, too. Hold on to your hats.

As a junior Colli simply won everything, everywhere. He was an Italian national champion destined for the very top and he duly signed professional terms with Liquigas in 2005. Then, however, his misadventures began in earnest. A pernicious Achilles injury wrote off his sophomore season in 2006, and he found himself relegated to the ProConti undercard at Panaria. Only his fourth day racing in their colours saw him land on his head at the Tour of Valenciana, and that was pretty much that. By 2008 the brightest star in the Italian firmament was unemployed.

A friend then persuaded him, somehow, to ride for a Hungarian ‘professional’ team, and they invited him to buy his own bike. Two years earlier he’d shared a Tour de Suisse podium with Robbie McEwen and outsprinted the great Tom Boonen. Now his team-mates were riding, literally, for beer money. Having won a stage “somewhere in Romania”, he enquired as to the location of the team’s hotel. He was duly directed towards a grotty-looking house and rewarded for his efforts with a night on a fetid living room floor.

He survived to tell the tale and signed for Flaminia in 2010. The problem was that they engaged Riccardo Riccò as well, and many race organisers turned their backs on them as a consequence. Somehow Colli got 12 top five placings regardless, and earned a decent contract with Team Type 1, the diabetes awareness outfit now known as Novo Nordisk. He says he felt “in harmony” with the cause there, and enjoyed the racing. He won a stage at the Tour of Austria and looked set, for once, to put together a whole season and fulfil his promise. But not quite.

By the autumn he’d earned a contract with newly-formed GEOX, and the promise of a return to the big time. Then, however, he started to suffer pain in his left knee and to become so debilitated that he could hardly get out of bed. His cycling pals persuaded him to play in goal during the annual end-of-season kickabout, whereupon the knee simply collapsed.

When the scan came back it revealed a giant tumour in the knee. He feared for his life in the first instance, his left leg in the second. In the end they replaced what remained of his patella (which was nothing but cancerous mush) with a piece of his hip bone, and thankfully there were no secondary cancers. He had got away with what he describes as his “Armstrong or Pantani” moment but it had been nip and tuck for a while. Somehow he came back again and looked to be in decent shape headed into last year’s Giro. A horrific crash at the Tour of Turkey wiped the smile off his face but he wasn’t about to let the lingering pain in his leg derail his season. He took to the start in Belfast, and proceeded to ride 15 stages. With a broken femur.

We could go on (and on) but much of it is so far-fetched that you probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. Suffice to state that the various battle scars he’s accumulated have lent his skin tone the consistency of coral reef and that his left arm, the one he trashed at the Giro, looks withered.

He’s evidently in good spirits, as befits a man for whom “suffering” has a meaning more profound than twiddling up a third category climb in the sunshine. His opening gambit today, however, is dramatic even by his extraordinary standards:

“There’s an iron rod in the arm and quite a bit of nerve damage. They’ve done some tests and apparently it’s 16 per cent invalid. Does it work? Sort of. More or less.” Welcome to Daniele Colli’s world.

For stage 6 of the 2015 Giro, RCS Sport proposed a breakneck 180-kilometre gallop to the Tyrrhenian seaside. Castiglione della Pescaia, a picturesque former fishing village in Southern Tuscany, would host a sure-fire bunch sprint.

Four days earlier the Giro had survived a near disaster. Twelve kilometres from the finish line in Genoa, a recreational cyclist had seen fit to try to hitch a ride with the gruppo. Inexplicably he’d jumped off the pavement and into a fast-moving peloton, with entirely predictable consequences. The majority had picked themselves up and dusted themselves down but not so the Belgian Pieter Serry. He was transported directly to hospital, his Giro over and the ambitions of his Etixx-Quick Step team leader, Rigoberto Urán, were seriously compromised.

Race director Mauro Vegni, ever the pragmatist, stated simply that it was unfortunate. However, he was powerless to legislate against crass stupidity, and it was impossible to install roadside guardrails the entire length of each stage. Trek’s Eugene Alafaci, having avoided the worst of it by landing on a team-mate, vowed to “keep racing, and hope something like this never happens again.”

And so to Castiglione, where Colli sought to break Nippo-Vini Fantini’s Giro duck. Though no pure sprinter, our host today wasn’t some reckless, gung-ho wannabe intent on wreaking havoc among the thoroughbreds. Two weeks earlier he’d almost eclipsed André Greipel at the Tour of Turkey. He’d been beaten into second by a Teutonic whisker there and knew that a repeat performance here would be of incalculable value to him, to his nascent team and, given that cycling is all about exposure, to their sponsors.

“I found a gap on the left-hand side of the road at about 300 metres and started my sprint. Suddenly something black appeared in front of me, and there was no way I could change direction. From there I remember not being able to feel my left arm, then looking down and realising it was the wrong way round. From there on in, what I most remember is absolute terror.”

The “something black” he’d collided with at 70kph was a spectator’s telephoto camera lens. As he lay in hospital, its owner, one Marco Caruso, issued a public apology. He was sorry Colli had crashed and that Alberto Contador had been caught up in it. The fault lay not with him, however, but with those charged with administering to the riders’ safety. There had been so many fans leaning over the crash barriers with cameras and telephones that he’d been compelled to do likewise to get the shot.

Colli is sanguine about it now, as is his wont. That he’s such a positive guy explains, to a significant degree, why he’s still making a living from his bike. It would be laughable were it not so absurd and, in this instance, so ruinous. It doesn’t alter the basic facts of the matter, however, and the facts are these:

a) SLR cameras, selfies, selfie sticks and the people who bring them to bike races now represent a clear and present danger.

b) The modern day bunch sprint bears no relation to those of even 10 years ago. It has become a grizzly, horrific, terrifying spectacle, and a recipe for disaster.

c) Sooner or later a rider risks being killed during a sprint, or at the very least suffering life-changing injuries.

d) The UCI has thus far done precisely nothing of significance to moderate the risks to the riders.

Ostensibly at least, Colli’s crash was caused by a spectator. He was sprinting at the side of the road, the guy was fool enough to stick his camera out, and Colli ploughed into it. However, Vegni’s subsequent assertion that it was a freak accident is misplaced, and so too the UCI’s inertia. Both miss the point, because what happened was a reflection on the times. Not only are today’s sprints radically different but so are the behaviours of those who attend them.

“You could say that what happened was an accident but it was an accident waiting to happen. I’ve looked at the video, and the camera I hit was one of dozens sticking out above the guardrail. Let’s not pretend that this won’t happen again, because unless something’s done it will. Sorry, but it is inevitable.”

This isn’t the forum for anthropological debate but we live in a society characterised by what Colli terms protagonismo (a need to be the centre of attention). Put simply, social media enables anyone to show off by uploading pictures instantly to Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever. As a result today’s spectator is able to delude himself that he’s an intrinsic part of the happening, and the camera, in one form or another, is his weapon of choice. Broadly speaking, therefore, we now have two types of cycling ‘fan’; those who go to see the bike race, and those who go the bike race to be seen. We have the imbeciles who compromise rider safety by running next to them in the mountains, and latterly those who go simply in order to take pictures of themselves in a large crowd. They don’t see the riders in the traditional sense (ie, with their eyes) but rather via their viewfinder or the four-inch screen of their mobile. But that isn’t important. What matters is their Facebook page, their protagonismo.

“The thing is that it was me, Daniele Colli, but it could have been anybody and it could have been much worse. Imagine if it had been Contador, and he’d lost the Giro because of it.”

The question, therefore, is what can be done? How can cycling indemnify itself against a repeat or, worse still, a fatality? We put it to Colli that a second set of guardrails a metre further back would resolve the issue. It would place further distance between the riders and spectators, and deal with the issue at a stroke.

“I’m all for higher guardrails, but you can’t add a second level because you replace one risk with a greater one. Most people only ever see the Tour, and the sprint stages there tend to be on big, wide boulevards. The Giro is different because the stages often finish in mediaeval town centres and that applies to other races, too. Sometimes you’ve only got a six-metre strip of road anyway, and you can’t very well reduce it to four because it would be absolutely lethal. It’s just not practicable, and still less so given the amount of riders involving themselves in the sprints.”

Once upon a time there was just the sprinter, and then it was the sprinter and his lead-out man. Then, about 25 years ago, Del Tongo built a lead-out ‘train’ for Mario Cipollini and these days all the specialist teams have one. The battle for position is ferocious and the consequence is incredibly high speeds. And high speeds on 23mm tyres equate to high danger, and the GC teams very well know it. They are obliged to keep their leaders out of trouble and out of trouble means as close to the front as possible. The front is better because there’s less chance of a crash and because losing a wheel at that speed can cost precious seconds. Put that lot all together and you have half the peloton pushing, shoving and jostling at breakneck speed, with the rest being sucked into the vortex. It’s little wonder that we’re at a point where we almost expect crashes. At the Tour, maillot jaune Tony Martin crashed out of the Tour under the kite at Le Havre. In addition to eight sprint trains on the flat stages, you could see Astana, BMC, Movistar and Sky trying to crowbar their GC leaders to the front. Likewise at Cambrai, Amiens and Fougères, and across hundreds of stages over the course of the season. At Genoa, where Colli’s calamity detector for once functioned adequately, he was acquainted with the sheer lunacy of it:

“I remember that sprint because I found myself between an Astana train and a Tinkoff train. They weren’t there trying to win the stage, just to ensure that a gap didn’t open up so that Aru and Contador didn’t lose time. The point is that I know how to find a gap, how to hold my line and how to sprint. A lot of these guys just don’t. They are swinging off all over the place, everyone is ultra-stressed and the whole scenario is just lethal. I was thinking, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s madness.’”  The question is what, in a practical, nuts-and-bolts sense, can be done about it? Current legislation has it that the final three kilometres are neutralised in the event of a crash but that only makes a difference after the incident. It makes no material difference to the dynamic of the race, and Colli is adamant that something has to happen sooner rather than later;

“We saw it on the Champs-Élysées. They neutralised it, so the GC riders and their teams sat up and it made for a much safer sprint. For me they have to take into account the type of stage and record the GC times three kilometres out, or five. That way you’re not having guys like Froome and Contador exposed to the risk, and the sprints themselves are much safer.”

It seems a good idea at first glance but whether it would work in practice remains to be seen. The danger is that you’d simply create a second sprint, ergo more madness. Another solution could be for the nonsprinters simply to be pulled up at that point, leaving a number of designated, predetermined riders to slug it out. That might smack of reverse engineering but a straight-up, man-on-man gallop between the specialists would still be a spectacle anyway. Just ask anyone who ever saw the great track sprinters in action, or the beauty of a Japanese Keirin race.

Regardless, Colli’s assertion that cycling’s governing body is compelled to intervene is well-founded. There is a sense that only a fatality will spur them into action, a tragedy that some consider to have only been avoided by sheer good fortune up to now.

Though it may seem heretical to some, it could be that safety in (reduced) numbers is the only way forward. The alternative, quite frankly, doesn’t bear thinking about.