Thomas De Gendt has played down the significance of his spectacular tyre blowout in the UAE Tour, where the Belgian’s mishap and subsequent crash sparked a wealth of speculation over the potential risks of a hookless rim system for tyres.
Lotto-Dstny had already insisted that they were “100% within the rules” and that their wheel setup was entirely UCI-compliant. Manufacturer Zipp also issued a statement saying that the impact with an object was to blame, rather than the rim and tyre combination.
De Gendt himself concurred with that interpretation of events when he spoke with Cyclingnews at the Volta a Catalunya, where he is gunning for one last stage win.
“I don’t know how it happened, it just did. But the wheel was very damaged,” De Gendt said. “Zipp has the wheel to investigate, they did this, and their investigation said it was because of a rock or something on the road.
“After the stage I saw the damage and it was not just damage from hitting the road, it was really damaged from hitting something, although I never saw anything.
“Also with the crash, some parts [of the wheel] are a bit missing. But it’s not like that the tyre came off by itself, it had to be because of something.
“Their investigation said it was something on the road that I hit and that made the wheel not really collapse, but get damaged enough hard enough to make the tyre go off.”
De Gendt confirmed that he was going to continue using the tyres. “Well, we’ve used them for the last three years and we’ve never had issues,” he said.
“It’s the first time I’ve had something like this. We know that if we have a flat tyre, you don’t have ride 10 kilometres with it because the tyre will go off.
“But we are also sure that they won’t put anything on the market that is unsafe. So this is probably just a one-time failure, because of the big force that made the rim just explode.”
De Gendt also pointed out that there had been similar events in the past, although the UAE crash was far more widely publicised. “Sometimes it happens if you jump on the pavement and you hit the edge, your wheel explodes and you also crash and you also get the tyre off.
“Like what the mechanic says to me, even if you had tubular wheels it would still have come off because of the big force of hitting something.”
Catalunya
Now in his final season as a professional, the 37-year-old is concentrating on taking one last stage in the Volta a Catalunya, which he already named pre-season as one of his big targets of the year.
Catalunya has always been something of a special race for De Gendt, with five wins to date, more than any other WorldTour event for the Belgian.
“I don’t know how the condition is, actually, after Oman and UAE I lost a lot of my condition because the racing there is so easy,” De Gendt told Cyclingnews at the start of stage 1.
“But I could do a few one-day races in Belgium and my training. But this is my first real race where I have to climb a lot so I don’t know how it will go.”
De Gendt is back in Catalunya after missing out on the race last season. Although this year’s route has been cited by some riders as exceptionally tough, with three major summit finishes, De Gendt is not so sure.
“They take away one summit finish at La Molina, although we do the climb [on stage 3] and they add in another, so it’s not so different. There are three stages that could end in a kind of sprint and the rest is for the GC guys, so it will be hard for sure.”
As for why it suits him so well, De Gendt says “It’s not a typical one-week race where there are three clear bunch sprint stages with a lot of good sprinters, there aren’t so many sprinters here either in this race either. So that makes it very open racing.”
“Take today [stage 1], on paper it could be a sprint stage, but it’s so hilly I don’t think we’ll get to the finish with more than 60 guys,” De Gendt said.
“And also the other GC teams will look to UAE to control things and may they’ll say, today we won’t do anything today, we’ll see what happens on the summit finish. And that makes it, like today, a good chance for the break to go.
“This kind of racing suits me very well, so I’ve always got a big chance of winning a stage. And half the time I was successful.”
De Gendt aims to return to south of the Pyrenees later in the year for more racing in what will be his last Grand Tour of his career, the Vuelta a España, although for now he’s cautious about whether he will definitively make the team line-up.
“I hope to be at the start, it’s always difficult to be in the selection - the Tour de France line-up is kind of already made up. Our best guys for that race will go there,” he said.
“Then we have other guys for the Vuelta, Lennert van Eetvelt will be going for GC, and I’d like to be there to support him. Then the days where he has a more relaxing day, I’d like to be in the break and try to win a second stage there.”
