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Montreal. When the Belgian cyclist Wouter Weylandt was killed in a crash during the Giro d’Italia in May, the commemoration began immediately. Each rider wore a black ribbon, and Weylandt’s initials and race number, 108, were painted across the remaining finish lines with the slogan: Always With Us.

But four months later and after dismissing Weylandt’s fatal crash as part of cycling, neither the International Cycling Union (UCI), the sport’s governing body, nor the organizer of the Giro has conducted a formal investigation. The police inquiry focused on criminal liability and found none.

Weylandt was the 10th professional cyclist to die in a crash during a road race since Fabio Casartelli, an Olympic gold medalist, was killed at the Tour de France in 1995. Most of the other deaths, with the exception of Andrei Kivilev’s during the Paris-Nice season opener in 2003, came in less prominent races and attracted relatively little attention.

The growing danger in professional cycling is not limited to fatalities. The sport does not keep accident statistics, but riders and cycling officials agree that the number and severity of race accidents have escalated significantly in recent years.

“There are a lot more dangers than 20 years ago,” said Pat McQuaid, UCI president. “But you can’t compare a death in a cycling accident and an NFL player going into a tackle and not coming up. In the Weylandt case, it was an accident out of the blue.”

But many riders disagree. “When I started racing, they told me that crashes are part of the contract,” said Marco Pinotti, a prominent Italian rider who broke his pelvis in another crash in this year’s Giro and was hospitalized for several weeks.

“This is a dangerous sport, and it will always be a dangerous sport. But I think in the last few years, it looks like crashes have increased and become more severe because the speed is higher, the technology of the bikes has changed and the level and size of the peloton [the pack] is higher.”

Pinotti recovered and made his comeback this month in Quebec and in Montreal.

Craig Lewis, Pinotti’s teammate and another Giro crash victim, has been less fortunate. Speaking from his home in South Carolina, Lewis said that he had regained only 75 percent to 80 percent of his usual form, and that he probably faces additional surgery on a leg he broke in the crash. He did, however, finish the USA Pro Cycling Challenge last month in Colorado.

Expanding race fields have compounded any problems on the courses. Until the 1980s, about 130 riders, and sometimes as few as 100, raced in major events like the Tour de France. Today, 200 is more the norm.

In a group that large, Lewis said, most of the riders in the pack are effectively blind to road hazards and must rely on shouted warnings from those at the front.

And the pack is getting faster and tighter. Better training, stricter entry rules and generally higher salaries mean that little separates the fastest and slowest riders today. More often than not, it takes a major mountain or other significant obstacle to break up a pack of 200.

The rising danger in cycling has been the subject of little debate and even less study. No one from the sport has asked Pinotti and Lewis about their crashes and neither expects any inquiry.

Technology offers few obvious answers. Helmets became mandatory after Kivilev’s death eight years ago, but offer limited benefits in high-speed crashes. And the physical demands of cycling make it impractical to use heavier protective gear of the sort that has made motor racing significantly safer.

Pinotti suggested that organizers of conventional races avoid drastic climbs or scenic wonders along narrow back roads.

“You can make a race hard, you can make a race epic, just on normal roads,” he said.

McQuaid acknowledged the problems but rejected the idea that races had become crowded or followed needlessly dangerous routes.

“At the end of the day, the responsibility is with the riders themselves,” McQuaid said. “I don’t think we can change fundamentally the whole organization of the sport.”

The New York Times