Who’s the greatest athlete on the planet? It’s hard to look beyond the Slovenian cyclist Tadej Pogacar, five times winner of the Tour de France, 2024 Giro d’Italia champion, victor in 13 one-day classics and twice World Road Race champion. Last week, he had the Spanish Vuelta – the one Grand Tour he hasn’t yet won – virtually sewn up, when he was badly injured in an accident in the peloton and carted off to hospital with a broken collar bone. Thankfully, his injuries weren’t as bad as Chris Froome’s in his career-ending, life-threatening accident in August last year when he sustained five broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a lumbar vertebrae fracture and a tear to the sac surrounding the heart.

What we often fail to see in all the hoopla of a Grand Tour is how dangerous cycling can be. We tend to associate deaths in sport with Formula 1 but no fatalities have been recorded in F1 since Jules Bianchi in 2015. Against that, there have been seven deaths in major cycling events in the past five years. The 19-year-old Welsh rider Finlay Tarling was killed this summer........

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