BMC Racing are faulting organizers of Pais Vasco for a crash in the final kilometre of stage 1 that took down several riders and sent the team's Peter Stetina to a local hospital with fractures to his tibia, kneecap and four ribs.
The incident occurred about 500 metres from the finish when riders encountered a line of unprotected and mostly unmarked steel poles alongside the curb, said BMC team director Jackson Stewart.
“There were these four-foot high steel posts – I'm not sure what they're there for, maybe to separate bikes from cars or to keep people from parking along the curb,” Stewart told Cyclingnews after visiting Stetina in the hospital.
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“They decided to just put those orange street cones on top of them, and that's how they were trying to mark them,” Stewart continued. “In the last kilometres when everyone is hugging the right side of the road and just the first guys get through the cone, for sure somebody is going to hit it. I was pretty shocked that they could actually even think that was going to work.”
Stewart said Stetina was about 30 riders back in the peloton when several riders in front of him hit one of the poles and Stetina followed.
“He just slammed it,” Stewart said. “From what I hear he somersaulted over it and then landed on another one. They were kind of in succession. It was a totally unfortunate crash.”
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