My first words to Fabian Wegmann were less than ideal.

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It was early in the morning on the top floor of ASO’s Paris office. We were both leaning over the bar ordering coffee, him because he’s a cyclist and this is what cyclists seem to do, me because such was my imposter syndrome I didn’t dare try and converse with the waiter about the range of available teas.

I heard him talking about the Lidl-Trek rider Max Walscheid’s retirement despite having two years remaining on his contract, and interjected with rather too much enthusiasm that I felt the recent managerial overhaul at the newly Germanised team was not going very well.

I then remembered that Lidl had taken over the running of the team, bringing in old teammates and colleagues of Wegmann, most notably the Schleck brothers. The discount supermarket was also the Deutschland Tour’s title sponsor, the very race he is the director of, and which had brought him to Paris in the first place, marking Castelli’s new jersey partnership agreement with ASO, including for the Tour de France and of Germany.

Thankfully, he adeptly brushed this off and soon we we riding around the outskirts of Paris, tackling roads typically used for the opening stage of Paris-Nice. Rest assured conditions were suitably grey and drizzly. Slowly I eked my way back into the former German champion’s proverbial good books with some sincere words of praise for the Deutschland Tour’s persistence with the prologue then, once all the new jersey partnerships had been shaken out of powerpoints and press releases, I nabbed half an hour to discuss all things rider safety and race security.

It’s a topic we’re working hard not to forget. In 2026, the sport of cycling has found itself in a position where riders are dying not through a lackadaisical sense of their own risk, but through the failure of race organisers to keep a closed road secure. It’s a disgrace.

When I interviewed Tour de France route designer Thierry Gouvenou earlier that day, he was relatively short on sensitivity, sympathising with the riders who had protested at Il Lombardia days before, but ultimately returning to the concept that riders are going too quickly, believing that cycling is increasingly resembling motorsport.

Then again, Gouvenou is maybe not the best person to speak on this, for he designs a course from the ivory tower of the Tour de France. The adage that the President of France is only such for 11 months of the year is reflected by the Tour de France director’s power to bring towns and villages to a standstill for the month of July.

The Tour director does not concern themself with phrases like “rolling road blocks”, except when exercising corporate hospitality. Because even on our 50km pootle earlier that morning, a race director’s car and outriding motorbikes were on hand to usher us through junctions and roundabouts. Traffic stops for ASO, as it would the head of state. Special guest Valentin Paret-Peintre must have been delighted.

The irony of this contrast was not lost on Wegmann, who agreed it felt jarring when in his own professional race, he is solely reliant on police closing roads and blocking traffic for his race to pass through.

“In the past at the Deutschland Tour, we had 40 police motorbikes, and now we have maybe 20. It’s getting less and less because the police said ‘it’s not our job to save races’. It’s their job to be there if something happens. If two football clubs are playing, they are just there. If 200 people are fighting each other, then they are there for that. That’s the rule in Germany, it’s totally different than in France. At the Tour de France, they have 30,000 policemen working for the event. If you have to pay them, it will never work.”

For Wegmann, his job has become all-consumed by the role of keeping his course safe, but still he admits, “if somebody comes out of a house with their car, it’s always still a problem.

“The main thing in our work is to make the route safe. In the end, we are all still on public roads, and we try to make it as safe as possible, but we when we create a course, we are going [through it] 3, 4, 5, times. We’re doing the routes and recons and say ‘Ok, we need a marshall there, we need a guy there, to look at every traffic island and every roundabout to put fences there, mattresses and everything to make it safe for the riders.

“It also depends on the rights of the countries where you are. It’s not in every country the same. You can’t say ‘we have one system and it works in in every country in the world’. In every country it’s different. Even if the UCI said ‘we need it, want it like this’, the countries are the owner of the streets.”

“It’s also a question of cost. One of the races I do is Munsterland [Giro], we have 1200 people standing there, and they all get money for it. So you can imagine how expensive it is to secure a race, and 100% we need a standard for the races. But I’ve always said we don’t need it just for the pros. We need a standard for every race.”

Referencing a recent event at the Sauerlandrundfahrt, a fourth tier-race with both professionals and amateurs that saw cars entering a closed time trial circuit, Wegmann also identified a difficulty with funding the physical infrastrcuture that keeps a race secure.

“You can’t put fences on a course that is 14 kilometres long. Then you need 28 kilometres of fences. It’s not possible. It’s not doable. You will never ever find a sponsor who pays 1 million euros just in fences and not have something from that. It’s a safe race, but [there’s] no income, it’s nothing.”

Although he’s hopeful for an outcome from the UCI’s commitment to reforming and upgrading safety in the sport, Wegmann also knows the commercial limitations on race safety.

“The UCI can do the regulations. They can say, ‘we need every traffic island to be covered like this. Every corner has to be covered like this’. You can create standards, and the races have to listen to that standard. But, and now I’m talking from the eyes of the organiser, it’s fucking expensive, right? I mean 90% of races are not making money. If you put the [safety] standard that high then you’ll have no races anymore.

“It’s still an old-fashioned sport. You can try to create a new race which is super safe, and it’s maybe also in a nice city and with a good course. You will never ever get Paris-Roubaix. It’s never on the same level. And Paris-Roubaix is not safe at all. It’s super dangerous to ride 60kph on cobblestones when it’s wet. So that’s part of our sport, and that makes it so interesting.

“But in the end from every crash we have to learn. We’re all making mistakes, but we have to learn from these mistakes and get better. Some things we can never change.

“Most of the crashes are because the riders are risking too much. Even if the manager says it’s a dangerous descent, and there are some roundabouts and traffic islands, you want to win as a rider. When it’s wet and you are a good descender, you think, ‘Now it’s my time, and then you go, and then things can happen.

“For me, as an organiser of a race, I always want to have a race which is where I think in the end I did everything I could to make it safe.”

To that end, Wegmann says he has regularly turned down offers from cities bidding to host the Deutschland Tour when he’s unable to plan a safe sprint finish. Or, when he does accept a bid, there is a political cost to making the race safe.

“Sometimes we remove traffic islands, or the city have to do it, but it’s really expensive to put a traffic island away and then rebuild it. It’s a lot of money for nearly nothing. And when the city have to pay it, they also have to tell their citizens. They pay their taxes and [the politicians] say, “Yeah, you paid €30,000 this year just for putting three traffic islands away and rebuilding them. It’s not easy.”

You can hear Fabian Wegmann’s thoughts in full on the latest episode of the road.cc podcast where he also discussed his own perceptions of risk and race safety during his own racing career, his relationship with team managers and riders, and the limitations of circuits in a 3,000km race Grand Tour compared to a five-day stage race.

Also in the episode, Ryan and I discuss the unveiling of the men’s and women’s Tour de France routes, both of which I quite like and not just because of the British Grands Départs. We also address the “toxic” cultures uncovered at both British Cycling and Team Picnic PostNL, for which Ryan has some defiant comments on the matter from Picnic directeur sportif Callum Ferguson, and our highlights from the 2026 road season.

The road.cc Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, , and Amazon Music, and if you have an Alexa you can tell it to play the road.cc Podcast. It’s also embedded above, so you can just press play.