A second’s silence was held firstly of the 2024 Road World Championships elite/U-23 highway race on Saturday to honour the reminiscence of Swiss junior rider Muriel Furrer.
Furrer died on Friday after struggling main accidents the 18-year-old crashed throughout the junior highway race earlier this week.
After session by the UCI with Furrer’s household, the remaining races within the Championships continued, and on Saturday morning within the city of Uster, moments earlier than the beginning of the elite girls’s highway race, riders and public stood in heavy rain in silent tribute to Furrer.
The six-strong Swiss girls’s workforce had been current on the entrance line of the peloton beneath the startline gantry, with their arms round every others’ shoulders as they confronted racing within the hardest of circumstances.
“With this second of silence we want to bear in mind the younger, cheerful, at all times humble and intensely optimistic Muriel,” the race speaker mentioned over the loudspeakers to the crowds and assembled riders in English and German.
“It’s a very particular feeling, it is a actually troublesome scenario for all of us, we simply attempt to make one of the best out of it,” Swiss racer Noemi Rüegg instructed Eurosport.
“It’s a house Worlds, we labored onerous for this, we are attempting to do our greatest and we are going to race with Muriel in our hearts and we are going to see the way it goes.”
“We cannot discuss outcomes, it is nearly going out and exhibiting we’re racing for Muriel and I feel the outcome can be secondary in the present day.”
“It can go each methods, we have by no means been in such a scenario and it is okay that no matter occurs can occur. We can’t be too onerous on ourselves in the present day.”
The commemoration at Uster was not the one tribute being paid to Furrer on Saturday morning in Switzerland, with flags flying at half-mast within the end space of the highway race. Meanwhile within the Para-Cycling Road World Championships, that are working concurrently in Zurich, Swiss rider Franziska Matile-Dorig pointed to the sky and to a black armband she was carrying as she crossed the road and claimed silver within the girls’s C4 class highway race.
