Javier Guillén: "We knew there was going to be Covid, but the drip is greater than we expected"

MADRID, 31 Ago. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The director of the cycling Tour of Spain, Javier Guillén, acknowledged this Thursday after the dispute of the eleventh stage of the Spanish round -in which five runners could not leave due to positive in Coronavirus-, that the organization "knew" that there would be this type of cases, although the drip "is greater" than they anticipated.

“We knew that there was going to be Covid because we have been suffering from it in the races all year, but it is true that it is a greater drip than we expected. Sanitary, it is not that it has an impact in terms of disease, all the reported cases have no health incidence and there are a lot of asymptomatic people," he said on the channels of Radiotelevisión Española (RTVE) collected by Europa Press.

There are already 20 cyclists who have had to leave La Vuelta 22 after testing positive, including the Englishman Simon Yates, leader of the BikeExchange-Jayco Team and winner in 2018, and the Frenchman Pavel Sivakov (INEOS Grenadiers), who was ninth in general.

"The equipment is constantly being analyzed and tested, we assume that is what is giving the positives. We hope that the evolution, from what we have had, would have to go down, but I am not a doctor, nor an epidemiologist. There is a protocol mandated by the International Cycling Union (UCI) that has an application that we follow," he added.

"What I am clear about is that it is not reporting any type of health incident. We could talk about normal terms. I owe it to medical criteria, I do not know what will happen, what I do know is that there is no concern of whether there are positives, there are illness. It has a cost for the race, but I can't govern health issues," he said.