The 2025 Tour de France could see yellow cards issued for bad behaviour by riders thanks to cycling’s answer to VAR. Every touch of shoulders, switch of wheels, dramatic acceleration and multilingual insult in the peloton will be scrutinised by a growing number of in-race cameras and UCI commissaries.
As part of the UCI’s bid to expand its repertoire of disciplinary and investigative tools, cards can be awarded for everything from celebrating a team-mate’s win to riding on the pavement. The card system was trialled last year and is now being integrated into World Tour racing.
If, during this year’s Tour, a rider is given two yellow cards during the race, he may be disqualified and suspended for seven days, while any rider accumulating three cards in 30 days is liable to be suspended for 14 days.
The first rider to be suspended under the new system was the Dutch rider Oscar Riesebeek, of the Alpecin-Deceuninck team, who received two yellow cards in three days in May. “Looking back, I realise my behaviour in the race was not only wrong, but also put fellow riders at risk,” he said.
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Although there are not yet referees brandishing cards in riders’ faces, they are, just as in other sports, subject to a degree of interpretation. An overlong “sticky bottle” – a rider holding on for too long to drinks bottles passed up from his team car – may also be sanctioned, although the exact time allowed remains unclear.
In the past high-profile riders such as the 2014 Tour winner, Vincenzo Nibali, and the former British national time trial champion, Josh Tarling, have fallen foul of race commissaries and been evicted from races for protracted “sticky bottles”. More seriously, assault, intimidation, insults, threats, improper conduct, including pulling the jersey or saddle of another rider, or hitting them with a helmet, knee, elbow, shoulder, foot or hand, will also be sanctioned.
But there have also been some accusations of over-zealous rule-making on the part of the UCI, particularly when it comes to riders raising their arms at the back of a finish line sprint, in celebration of a team-mate’s success.
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“What is yellow and what isn’t yellow?” the sprinter Jasper Philipsen, Riesebeek’s team-mate and winner of three stages in last year’s Tour, said, after a crash in the Baloise Belgium Tour led to fellow rider Davide Bomboi being punished. “He had done nothing wrong,” said Philipsen. “Yellow was unjust and unnecessary.”
But while cameras will be used to punish aggressive, dangerous or unsporting behaviour, they will also play a role in detecting any other signs of technical fraud, such as motor doping, during the race.
During each stage, the UCI will run an “incident and performance monitoring programme”, effectively watching the peloton through a battery of lenses, not just for unsporting behaviour but also for unusual or suspicious body language while riding.
“Anything that arouses suspicion will be identified, enabling better targeting of checks,” the UCI said. The UCI will have multiple cameras watching the race, according to the UCI jury member and commissaire Kenneth Simonsson.
“We have five motorbike cameras, two helicopters and fixed cameras in the finish area, totalling 14 different feeds, during the stage. We record any incidents and share it with our jury colleagues, to discuss after the race.”
This is in addition to the usual post-race bike checks on the stage winner, the leader of each classification, a selection of random riders and “any rider who gives rise to suspicion, for example following the pre-stage control or as a result of events identified during in-race monitoring”.
The UCI says this heightened strategy enables it to “continuously monitor changes and anomalies in bike equipment and configuration,” through “pre-race magnetometer scans, incident and performance monitoring, and post-race X-ray inspections”.
The man leading the fight on motor doping, a former US homeland security investigator, Nick Raudenski, remains keen to keep a low profile at major races, but says monitoring rider behaviour is an increasingly important tool in his efforts to prevent technological fraud.
The American has likened the threat of motor doping to a “technological arms race”. The UCI president, David Lappartient, was more blunt. “If we have a case of cheating with a motor in the bike – sorry, but it will destroy our sport,” Lappartient said in 2024.
Raudenski sees VAR as an essential component for “watching how performances happen, watching biomechanical behaviour, watching how riders are acting and how they react to us, when we do a bike check”. Aligned with the greater scrutiny is an appeal to the consciences of those working within the sport, after the UCI launched an informant reward programme last year to further accelerate investigation of technological fraud.
“We want people who have an interest in doing the right thing,” Raudenski said. “We have to move towards a culture of integrity.” – Guardian
