Not even a month has passed since the tragedy of Finlay Tarling, the 19-year-old rider from NSN Development Team who lost his life on August 14th during the Tour of Portugal after being hit during the race. Yet yesterday, September 3rd, in the final meters of the opening time trial of the Sauerlandrundfahrt in Germany, rider Louis Leidert (Lidl - Trek Future Racing) had to swerve to avoid vehicles on the road not once but twice. Everything happened live on television, showing how close we came to another unjustifiable tragedy.

The double near-miss for Leidert

It was the final kilometer of the individual time trial opening the SauerlandRundfahrt 2026 and 21-year-old Louis Leidert, from the Lidl-Trek development team, was finishing the stage fighting for a top 10 position. While navigating a left-hand semicurve at high speed, to everyone's disbelief, a vehicle appeared coming in the opposite direction on the same inside line as the rider. The German athlete fortunately managed to notice in time and swerve out of danger, while the car tried to give as much space as possible by mounting the sidewalk. He barely had time to recover from the shock when—right in the final meters—another vehicle appeared in front of the rider in the fenced-off section, this time traveling in the same direction, attempting to enter a side street.

During the final kilometer of the ITT at the SauerlandRundfahrt 2026, Louis Leidert (Lidl-Trek) encountered two cars on the course that had no business being there.

With the first oncoming vehicle, things could have ended very badly. Fortunately, nothing happened. Phew! https://t.co/sj2mmU06PN pic.twitter.com/XwSaBQO324

— René Bugner (@RNBWCV) September 3, 2026

Above is the disturbing video showing the double near-miss. It goes without saying that it was a matter of seconds, and we would otherwise be writing a completely different article. In the first case, it would have taken only Leidert maintaining his aerodynamic position and looking down for a few more seconds (how can one not think of Stefan Küng in the time trial at the 2023 Europeans) and he would have risked a head-on collision with dynamics dramatically similar to what happened to poor Tarling. In the second instance, we came within meters of a terrible rear-end collision.

to be updated