The South African team management are fuming after team manager Greame McCallum and Jeremy Maartens were thrown off the tour in the sixth stage of the Tour de Langkawi.
McCallum paced Maartens back to the bunch after he struck a cone and punctured both wheels and a race referee ludicrously disqualified them both.
In cycling its common practice to help a rider to the bunch when he punctures. When he loses the pace and then gets helped back it’s another story.
Usually a manager is warned on the road, but the race referee’s radio wasn’t working in this instance and McCallum couldn’t hear the warnings. The SA team aren’t about to leave the situation there and SA’s head manager, Bart Harmse, has vowed to take things up with the race organisers.
“Jeremy is an integral part of the team and has done unbelievable work as a domestique. He was also going to play a major part in the Genting climbing stage,” he said.
The feeling in the camp is that they are being punished by the organisers for allegedly working with Mapei-Quickstep in the previous stage in which Robert Hunter claimed his third stage victory.
Compared to some of the other “crimes” thus far in the tour, which include riders holding onto their team cars, the incident with Maartens deserved a lighter sentence.
It has happened on various occasions that riders have held onto vehicles in the tour without being punished. In the light of that the Maartens disqualification makes little sense.
Taken from Cyclelab website
