CHATEAUROUX, France (Velo) — Tour de France race promotional videos that feature crash highlight reels are coming under fire from one of the most influential team bosses in the peloton.
Richard Plugge, general manager at Visma-Lease a Bike, blasted Tour de France owners ASO for including footage of wipeouts and tumbling riders in its promotional videos used by the owners of cycling’s most important race.
“I would be ashamed to have crashes in my race if I were an organizer,” Plugge told Velo and other journalists Saturday. “I would almost hide it. I think we should be ashamed of showing all this to the world. It’s not good.”
The issue recently made headlines after Michael Woods, writing in his blog on Velo, suggested that race organizers use highlight reels of spills and thrills to hype the race in promotional videos.
One such video was shown to riders before the start of the 2025 Tour in Lille, and a similar video is also part of the annual unveiling of the Tour route each fall in October in Paris.
Plugge, speaking about a wider range of safety issues, said he’s spoken to director ASO’s Yann Le Moenner about the promotional videos featuring wipeouts.
“I don’t believe [ASO] love crashes, but I already said a few times to the big boss at ASO at why do you put in the video to show how great the Tour de France is, and in that video are 10 crashes,” Plugge said.
“In my opinion, you don’t celebrate cycling by showing crashes,” Plugge said. “You celebrate cycling by showing the big guns on the Mur-de-Bretagne, but not those big crashes.”
Woods: ‘No matter what ASO says, they love crashes’
Writing in his Tour de France blog post on Velo last week, Canadian star Woods raised the issue in a larger discussion of safety issues currently engulfing cycling.
Following racing deaths in 2023 and 2024, rider safety is front and center of the discussion among cycling’s stakeholders.
Woods, however, pointed out how ASO is using the crash videos to promote the race. There was no direct comment from ASO about the videos, which also show the pageantry and drama of the Tour.
“At our team presentation, just before the grand départ, ASO brought all the riders into the Lille Opera House for their annual pre-race briefing. As always, they kicked the meeting off with a video of the highlights from the previous year’s race,” Woods wrote on Velo.
“Stage wins, epic scenery, and of course crashes were the main features of the film. No matter what ASO says, they love crashes. Despite their claimed “attempts” to make the sport safer, one gets a sense – when watching any highlight reel they create – that blood, broken bikes, and some poor bastard walking into an ambulance are what they love to sell.”
#TDF2025 | ⚠️ Violente chute à moins de 6km de l’arrivée !
Un petit groupe de coureurs est au sol, dont Almeida, Healy, Martin.
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This Tour, like most years, has already seen its fair share of high-speed crashes and spills. Several riders went down Sunday, but none were forced to abandon.
João Almeida (UAE Emirates-XRG) exited the Tour Sunday due to injuries he suffered in a high-speed fall Friday on the approach to the Mur-de-Bretagne.
A few others have also pulled out due to crashes, including Eddie Dunbar (Jayco-AlUla) and Jack Haig (Bahrain-Victorious).
Behind the scenes, the SafeR group is working to improve safety, but Plugge isn’t completely satisfied, claiming that the group that he was once part of has become political.
He suggested the safety issue should be in the hands of a third party, similar to the International Testing Agency, which handles anti-doping controls and is beyond the direct control of the UCI.
“We need to have experts make these decisions, not politicians,” Plugge said.