• Jonas Vingegaard taken to hospital after crash on Thursday
• Dutchman aiming to successfully defend Paris-Roubaix title

Mathieu van der Poel, who aims to retain his Paris-Roubaix title this weekend, says riders are the main danger when it comes to race safety.

Thursday’s stage four in the Tour of the Basque Country was marred by a horrific crash in which Jonas Vingegaard broke a collarbone and several ribs and also sustained pulmonary contusion and a pneumothorax. The crash happened at a turn on a high-speed descent, and race leader Primoz Roglic was forced to abandon the race, while Remco Evenepoel suffered a fracture to his right collarbone and his right shoulder blade.

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• The 2022 and 2023 winner fractured collarbone and scapula
• Incident saw 12 riders crash on fourth stage of Basque tour

Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard was taken to hospital with a broken collarbone after a serious crash on stage four of Itzulia Basque Country.

Vingegaard also suffered several broken ribs from the high-speed accident that also included Remco Evenepoel and Primoz Roglic among a group of 12 affected riders.

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Trhas Tesfay, who fled war in Ethiopia, says she suffers hunger headaches as she cannot eat Home Office hotel meals

One of Ethiopia’s elite female cyclists will be pedalling at the front of one of London’s biggest bike races next month while living in an asylum seeker hotel on less than £10 a week.

Gold medal winner Trhas Teklehaimanot Tesfay, 22, rode a bicycle for the first time when she was 13 years old. She has achieved success in a range of competitions such as the African continental championships and the national championships of Ethiopia.

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First bikes will be collected in the Netherlands and Germany in mid-April, with other countries following afterwards

Dutch cargo bike firm Babboe is recalling 22,000 of its popular cycles over safety fears, around one-third of its bikes on the road.

Babboe had already announced a recall of two models in February but said five more models were now a concern.

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• Men’s world champion produces devastating attack on cobbles
• Elisa Longo Borghini wins women’s race in sprint finish

The men’s world champion, Mathieu van der Poel, crushed his rivals with a devastating long-range attack to claim his third Tour of Flanders on Sunday.

In the women’s race, the Italian Elisa Longo Borghini came home first after outsprinting Poland’s Kasia Niewiadoma and Shirin van Anrooij of the Netherlands.

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Despite my local council claiming to favour walkers and cyclists, it seems to be actively making my life more difficult

When I sold my car, I didn’t expect a pat on the head; I wore my halo on the inside, and that was enough. But I did assume that those who had encouraged me to do the right thing – among them, my local council, which supposedly favours the walker, the cyclist and the keen user of the bus – wouldn’t now actively seek to make my life more difficult.

Three years later, and part of me wonders why I bothered. Thanks to low traffic schemes, which benefit only select groups of very lucky people, bus journey times are often twice as long as they used to be, cars having been forced on to the main road. Meanwhile, the council has decreed that those who want their garden waste to be collected, as it has been ever since I’ve lived here, must henceforth pay £75 a year for the privilege – and for a service only half as frequent as before.

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Riding a bike is not a political act, yet cyclists have become the bete noire for the anti-woke, anti-green, anti-liberal crowd

Getting my bike nicked was like losing a pet. I didn’t want a new one; I wanted to go back in time and not lose my old one. But, in the end, an inanimate object is not infinitely grievable and I need wheels. This is how I fetched up with a Liv bike , my precious first born putting the seat up for me. I said how proud and heart-filled I was, watching him do a little job that I didn’t want to do myself for the first time, and he said: “I’ve been showing you how to use a remote control since I was six years old,” and I thought: OK, fair, but, more to the point, look at my lovely bike.

Freshly re-enamoured of the world of two wheels, I have plunged straight back into the cycling discourse, the perfect microcosm of the wokeness split in all its forms. Take the ex-footballer Joey Barton, who is being sued by Jeremy Vine for calling the broadcaster a “ bike nonce ”. Meanwhile, the socials are full of people furiously agreeing that aggressive cyclists pose more danger to them than articulated lorries. The fervent attacks on low-traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and low-emission zones such as Ulez in London are really just a full-throttle loathing of people on bikes, aggrandised by acronyms and libertarian bat signals.

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• Slovenian makes it four victories from race’s seven stages
• Mikel Landa second overall, almost four minutes down

Tadej Pogacar completed his mastery of this year’s Volta a Catalunya, sprinting to a fourth stage win in the seven-stage race.

The Slovenian, already in total command of the Volta going into the final stage around Barcelona, left his rivals trailing once again, giving him overall victory ahead of Mikel Landa by three minutes and 41 seconds. Egan Bernal, five minutes and three seconds down, finished third.

More details to follow …

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