As the teams gathered here for Saturday’s start of the 2009 Tour de France, two prominent riders and one team director today expressed disapproval of the organizer’s intention to ban the use of radio communication during two stages in the middle week of the race, claiming that it threatens their safety.<\/p>\n
“Next they’ll be asking us to ride for two days without helmets, or without cables in our brakes,” said the veteran German rider Jens Voigt, twice a wearer of the Tour’s yellow jersey, during a press conference given by his Saxo Bank team.<\/p>\n
Since the mid-1990s, team directors have used radios to keep in contact with their riders, providing them with a stream of tactical instructions and information concerning the state of the race. By banning the devices during a flat run from Limoges to Issoudun on 14 July and a much hillier affair including two first\u00e2\u20ac\u2018category climbs between Vittel and Colmar three days later, the organisers are clearly hoping to reintroduce an element of old-fashioned spontaneity and uncertainty…\u00c2\u00a0 Details\u00c2\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the teams gathered here for Saturday’s start of the 2009 Tour de France, two prominent riders and one team director today expressed disapproval of the organizer’s intention to ban the use of radio communication during two stages in the middle week of the race, claiming that it threatens their safety. “Next they’ll be asking […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling","category-road-bike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15438"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15440,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15438\/revisions\/15440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stokednews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}