Wout van Aert has lashed out at some other teams in the Giro d’Italia. The fourteenth stage of the Italian cycling tour was marred by a mass crash on Saturday.
“It’s the riders’ fault that this happened,” said Van Aert after the stage. “The general classification teams are so nervous. They create stress themselves, and that’s why they fall. That needs to be said.”
About 20 kilometers from the finish in Nova Gorica, Slovenia, part of the peloton crashed on a wet cobblestone street. The damage was especially great for the general classification riders. Juan Ayuso, Primoz Roglic, and Egan Bernal lost almost a minute.
Visma-Lease a Bike escaped the crash and set the pace in the front of the peloton. Simon Yates, a teammate of Van Aert at Visma-Lease a Bike, also rode in this group. He climbed to second place in the standings behind Isaac Del Toro.
Van Aert would have preferred the stage to end in a mass sprint. “I would have preferred to win with Olav (Kooij, ed.) and ride to the finish with a decent peloton. You don’t want to gain time this way.”
“We want to sprint to win. The last thing we’re going to do is take risks. Some teams should use their brains a bit better sometimes.”
After the crash, Van Aert and his teammates decided to keep riding. “With a closed race situation, we would always have waited, but now there was still a leading group ahead. They were never going to neutralize the race anyway.”
The winner of the stage, Kasper Asgreen, came from that leading group. The Dane soloed to victory and stayed sixteen seconds ahead of the first chasing group.