Steff Cras has had enough of RyanAir’s nonsense

Steff Cras has had enough of RyanAir’s nonsense

The life of a professional cyclist is, you might think, a glamorous one – and you might be wrong. The latest rider to bring that point home is the young Belgian climber, Steff Cras.

Cras lined up at the Vuelta a España as he has twice before, hoping to go into battle for his ailing Lotto-Soudal team in the fight against relegation. It wasn’t to be. On stage 2, before the race had even reached Spain, he crashed out, leaving the race with a fractured elbow, a fractured scaphoid and a fractured finger. That was an inglorious end to his three years with Lotto-Soudal, an early start to his off-season, and something to come back from for his upcoming stint with Team TotalEnergies.

An even less glamorous chain of events was to come, though. After a season spent riding thousands of kilometres, showing steady progress and honing his craft, Steff Cras was about to come up against RyanAir at their most capriciously cruel.

You have probably heard of RyanAir – the ultra-budget Irish airline that is very good at social media, and slightly worse at getting passengers from A to B in comfort. We do not know where Steff Cras was flying to or from using their service, but we do know it didn’t go well. Like many people before him, Cras used his social media presence (Twitter: 2,613 followers; Instagram: 4,331 followers) to express his displeasure:

To be fair, it does sound like a harrowing journey, but with the remove of distance, I think there are some aspects of the journey that seem, actually, a little bit funny. I mean, I would be fuming if I expected to land in Melbourne and instead had to catch a bus from Perth, but I think at a point you’d just chalk it up as part of life’s rich tapestry, ya know?

I’m also intrigued by point #3 in the Steff Cras shitlist – ‘barely food’. A mousse? A sorbet? A wafer? We are probably closest to grasping the cause of the all-caps missive with this point. Steff Cras – a pro cyclist in the off season with a number of broken bones – was probably a little bit hangry.

At time of writing, RyanAir has not responded to Steff Cras, but I think I can speak for all of us in wishing that they would. I want to know more about this flight from hell. I want to know where it landed, and where it was originally supposed to. I want a full itemised rundown of what was on the refreshments trolley. I want to know about the chaos of the busses.

In fact, I won’t even stop there. I want Benoît Cosnefroy to have an annoying time on Easyjet. I want Juraj Sagan to lose a wheel from his suitcase en-route to Tenerife. I want Mathieu Burgaudeau to be sent to the wrong gate. Then, I want all of them to tell the world about it with the caps lock ON. These are the petty off-season dramas that I crave.