After several top riders - including Remco Evenepoel and Jonas Vingegaard - said the organisation of the opening TTT at La Vuelta was badly thought out, Eddie Dunbar also lent his voice to the chorus of criticism.
The Irishman, who crashed twice during the 14.8km TTT in Barcelona, said his Jayco AlUla team was well known for being very good at team time trials, saying the team test on Saturday was a missed chance. And while Dunbar is generally quite an easy going rider, not prone to being openly critical in interview, he was among those GC favourites to make his views known.
Vingegaard (Jumbo Visma) had already complained it seemed like the race organisers, or whoever put in place the TTT arrangements in place, "don't care about our safety at all", adding after the event it was almost completely dark when the riders had to make their way through traffic back to their team buses. Evenepoel (Soudal QuickStep) complained the riders were being "disrespected".
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Dunbar, who crashed with five of his team mates on one corner and then slid out himself on the final corner, clearly saw the stage as a missed chance, but also made the point that nobody could control the weather.
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"It's never good and obviously this team is known for going well and team time trials," the Irishman said of the TTT. "We were well drilled, we'd done a good recon and it's disappointing.
"There's nothing we could have done... everyone's seen the video (of the crash) and I think that the road was just slippery and we all came down and we lost a good bit of time there.
"We worked it out and by the time we got back going it was still 35 seconds we lost there. It's disappointing, it was a bit of a dangerous course for conditions like that, that's for sure."
Asked what he thought about the conditions before today's stage, with the riders again starting in the race, Dunbar said he was "not happy about it".
"But we can't control the weather," he said. "We had 15 days in a row, I think, at the Giro of the rain. I think the main worry is the fact it hasn't rained here for so long so the road surfaces are quite dangerous. But, as I said, I guess that's out of our control."
