Wednesday's EuroFile: McQuaid willing to change ProTour
The UCI is ready to renegotiate the structure of the ProTour, Pat McQuaid said Wednesday, but the organization’s president said he is not prepared to compromise on the overall “governance of cycling.”
McQuaid and the organizers of the sport’s three grand tours – the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España – have argued for more than a year over the structure the ProTour, the number of teams and economic issues, including television rights. Much of that dispute involves Tour de France organizer Amaury Sports Organization (ASO), which also promotes such major races as Paris-Nice, Paris-Roubaix and Liege-Bastogne-Liege.
“The UCI is prepared to renegotiate the structure of the ProTour,” McQuaid told the regional French newspaper Sud-Ouest. “What we won’t do, however, is compromise as to the leadership of the UCI and the governance of cycling.”
Last month, ASO boss Patrice Clerc, said it was time for a complete change in the way the sport of cycling is governed and called for McQuaid’s resignation. Following a succession of doping scandals at the Tour, Clerc said that much of the fault lay with the UCI and the governing body was simply incapable of restoring trust to the sport.
"The piloting of cycling's reconstruction cannot be given to the UCI," Clerc said. "We will have to do it with all those who reject the current system in order to find our values again: riders, teams, sponsors, federations ... will all need to unite."
That unity has been elusive since the creation of the ProTour in 2004.
The race organizers argue that the ProTour is a closed system that hampers their ability to pack their races with popular national teams and a veiled threat to their economic interests, especially when it comes to the potential loss of lucrative TV rights.
ProTour advocates, meanwhile, say the 20-team league brings professionalism and stability as well as provides a stronger ethical platform in the fight against doping.
A compromise got the ProTour system through the 2006 season, but over the 2007 season major race organizers, led by ASO, openly disregarded selection rules, which require all 20 ProTour teams to gain automatic berths for ProTour events.
The two most recent additions – Astana and Unibet.com – were not given automatic selections to events. Astana did receive “wild card” invitations throughout the season. Unibet, however, was excluded from most major events – including the big three tours – and the team’s sponsor will pull out of the sport at the end of the season.
Signs of compromise were fleeting at best. The UCI and ASO did provide a unified front at the start of the Tour de France when both embraced the requirement that teams and riders sign an “ethics pledge” promising to ride a clean race and putting a year’s salary behind the commitment. That unity, however, collapsed when Danish newspapers revealed that then-Tour-leader Michael Rasmussen had missed two out-of-competition drug tests in the weeks leading up to the race.
Clerc and race director Christian Prudhomme said that Rasmussen should never have been allowed to start the race had McQuaid fully enforced existing UCI rules. Clerc then called for the UCI president’s resignation or dismissal. Clerc accused McQuaid of intentionally sabotaging the Tour.
“It’s almost as if the UCI is trying to kill the greatest event in the sport,” Clerc said.
McQuaid said he found Clerc’s comments “regrettable.”
Regarding the sport’s biggest problem – doping and its effect on the health of the sport - McQuaid said that the UCI called for an independent audit of the sport following the testosterone positive of 2006 Tour winner Floyd Landis. That audit, McQuaid noted, will be finished in five to six months.
McQuaid said he intends to take the resulting report seriously.
“If he recommends a reduction of the number of race days in the grand tours or an increase in the number of rest days, or fewer mountain stages, it should be considered,” he said. “I can already predict, though, that the organizers won’t like it and we’ll encounter another controversy.”
Astana?
McQuaid also said Wednesday that the long-term viability of Astana remains in doubt, following positive blood-doping results from the team’s top two riders, Alexander Vinokourov and Andrei Kashechkin.
McQuaid said team manager Marc Biver has been summoned to appear before a UCI panel to explain the positives and what Astana is doing to correct the situation.
“For one thing, we need to see what Biver knew about what his riders were up to,” McQuaid said. “Furthermore, we need to be confident that changes will be made and that those changes will succeed. Otherwise, we could see a revocation of the license. It will all depend on what changes are made in the operation of that team.”
