The Giro d’Italia Just Had to Tell Pro Cyclists to Stop Peeing in Their Water Bottles

Be careful the next time you scramble to grab water bottle tossed by your favorite pro bike racer at the Giro d’Italia.

There might be more than sports drink inside.

The UCI commissaires issued an unusual warning during the Giro d’Italia buried deep in the stage 9 jury report.

Apparently, someone in the peloton got creative.

The daily jury reports are normally packed with the routine infractions of modern racing: sticky bottles, littering violations, public urination, and fines for inappropriate behavior.

Sunday’s stage 9 checked nearly every box:

Mirco Maestri of Team Polti Visit Malta received a 200 CHF fine for a “sticky bottle,” and team director Giovanni Ellena was also fined 500 CHF.

Christopher Juul-Jensen of Jayco AlUla was hit with a 500 CHF penalty and docked 25 UCI points for disposing of waste outside litter zones.

Lennert Van Eetvelt of Lotto-Intermarché was fined 200 CHF for public urination during the race at kilometer 33 and for “damaging the image of the sport.” David De La Cruz of Pinarello-Q36.5 received a 500 CHF fine for “inappropriate behavior.”

The bike police even scanned 38 bikes, and “all the bikes complied with the UCI regulations,” the report read.

Then came the added note from commissaires specifically warning riders not to pee into bottles and potentially toss them into the bushes.

“To respect the image of cycling and the Giro d’Italia, the organizer and the Commissaires’ Panel inform all riders that urinating into a bottle and subsequently discarding it is strictly prohibited,” the jury report stated.

A rare formal warning

It was a rare formal warning issued to the 167 professional cyclists in the Italian grand tour, reminding them that a bidon is not a portable toilet.

What happened? There was not a specific incident cited, but suggests it’s something the jury noticed.

Maybe someone couldn’t stop at a key moment of the race.

Maybe they were tired of getting fined for roadside nature breaks. Or perhaps they simply did not want to sully their shorts.

With fans routinely scrambling to grab discarded bidons from their favorite riders as roadside souvenirs, the UCI might simply be trying to protect the unsuspecting public.

It peels back the layers on the sometimes-not-so-subtle efforts to answer nature’s call during a five-hour bike race. Sometimes a rider has no choice.

Chasing down discarded bidons is a beloved grand tour tradition. It is also, apparently, now a mild biohazard risk.

No one wants that kind of souvenir.