Vuelta director Javier Guillén unsatisfied with current Covid outbreak: "I don’t know what’s going to happen"

At the start of stage 12 a total of 23 riders abandoned due to Covid-19 confirmed, about 8% of all riders who began the Vuelta a Espana. Inbetween those are Sam Bennett, Simon Yates and Ethan Hayter who were some of the headliners for the event. Race director Javier Guillén has talked about it's evolution.

In an interview after yesterday's stage with TVE, Guillén has said that “there isn’t any kind of medical situation going on. I’m no doctor, no matter what I think, I’m the director of the Vuelta a España and the COVID cases are occurring. I stick to medical criteria, I don’t know what’s going to happen, but what I do know or understand is that there is no general state of concern. There is no requirement for the teams to do more, but they do it," he said about the teams carrying out their own interal testing throughout the race.

Although at the start it were few cases, over the last few days several riders have abandoned the race daily in a rate that seems to be growing. There is an ongoing debate on who should abandon the race or not, but unlike the Tour de France, there is no known case of an infected rider staying in the race thus far.

“We knew there would be COVID cases, because we’ve had COVID in all the races, but perhaps there is a bigger drip of cases going on,” Guillén continued. “There are lots of asymptomatic cases and very light ones. We know the teams are testing a lot and that’s what producing the positives. We hope that the situation will get better.”

He's shown lack of satisfaction regarding the situation, and argues the teams' testing is playing a role in the amount of abandons. “When you test positive with an antigen, the right thing is to do a PCR. And if the viral load [from a PCR] turns out to be low, they can race,” he said.

“The problem is that when they test positive in the morning, they don’t have time to do the PCR before going to the start. They would have to be allowed to start without knowing what the viral load is, and I suppose they [the UCI] still aren’t ready to allow that," Guillén concluded.