Background Professional road cycling is associated with a high incidence of traumatic injuries. Despite these risks, current injury data-collection methods lack consistency and standardisation, thereby limiting meaningful surveillance and prevention efforts. Aim To describe the development of a secure, centralised injury surveillance system for elite cycling that enables standardised data collection, contextual integration and long-term injury tracking while ensuring compliance with ethical and data protection standards. Methods The system integrates an incident-activated Qualtrics-based injury reporting platform (hosted at Queen’s University Belfast) used by team medical staff and accessed via (or) within a secure, access-controlled server infrastructure hosted at IDLab, Ghent University. The database is protected by role-based authentication, encrypted data transmission and application programming interface-based access controls. Race footage and contextual data (eg, weather including ambient temperature, terrain) will be linked to medical reports to improve understanding of injury mechanisms. Ethics and governance The system is designed to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation. Data pseudonymisation, consent protocols and ethics are built into the design. All access is logged, monitored and restricted to authorised users only. Expected outcomes The project is expected to improve the quality and completeness of injury data in professional road cycling, facilitate epidemiological research, inform the development and evaluation of injury prevention strategies and support international policy development.
Fallon et al. (2026) studied this question.