Premier Post: My Explantion for the UCI/ASO fight

A new blog...just what the world needs. I was reading about a recent spat in a NoCal masters race this morning when I finally figured out a theme for a blog. The idea will be to try to discuss what bike racing means. I want to discuss training, racing, fighting, politics, attacking, defending, cross-winds, wheel sucking, et al.

For now, I'm going to post my take on the current UCI/ASO tiff. I wrote it about two weeks before Paris-Nice. Some of it is dated but some of it gives background to the entire ordeal.





So cycling has a deeper problem now than just doping. Who'da thunk?
Since 1998 and the "Festina Affair" where we all thought every sponsor would take their money and walk away, we've all believed that doping would either kill the sport or solutions would be found to stop the drug taking. It should slowly be dawning on all of us that doping will never kill cycling. The sponsors don't care. Some do, granted. Some seem to be making serious attempts to hire clean riders and keep them clean, but Mr. Tinkoff doesn't care and Mr. Bruyneel doesn't care and the list goes on. These men shouldn't be blamed for what they are doing. They reflect the business of cycling. There is money to be made and they are trying to make it. That's not a sin. Cheating? Don't be stupid. Who cares; it's simply not the point. The sport exist because of sponsors who are willing to pay money to advertise and reach the cycling fans along the road. On some level this is going to exist no mater how much doping occurs. The sponsors need to reach the people that they need to reach. If they reach them with doped riders, great; if they reach them with clean riders, great. Certainly there are many sponsors that can't live with this arrangement—and many of those are the very largest sponsors—but there are still many companies who can fulfill their marketing objectives (relatively cheaply) with doped riders. The sport is viable with or without doping. Maybe the lesson we've learned since 1998 is that the sport can exist at a very high level, WITH DOPING.

But this new problem is something else. Recently Velonews characterized the new problem as a "civil war" within the organizing structure of pro cycling. So you're a casual cycling fan, right? The question is this: What the hell does that mean?

Here's the quick and dirtiest explanation you'll get. It all started with team Mercury in 2001 (that dude at Velonews wasn't going to explain that to you, was he). The American company had plowed several million dollars into a new cycling time and expected to be admitted into the Tour de France. Cleary, their investment was only worthwhile under such circumstances. The process of gaining entrance into the TDF had only recently become a bit dicey. In the mid 80's Team 7-11 had easily been admitted, in 1989 Greg LeMond's small Team ADR also easily gained a birth. At that point in pro cycling's growth curve, it was hard enough to find a sponsor wealthy enough to field a team in the Tour—the organizers of the Tour couldn't afford to be picky; it was that simple. By the late 90's things were beginning to change. Every year the organizers seemed to have a few more teams that wanted to ride their charming little race. The ASO (which is the company that organizes of the Tour) began to establish criteria for the new teams to shoot for. That criteria amounted to… Let's just say they chose to express their Frenchness in their decisions. If you wanted to ride the Tour and you were a small team, you basically had to "kiss the ring." In addition to owning the Tour, ASO owned several important early season races (they hadn't always owned these races; this was a new development in the sport). So kissing the ring amounted to showing up at ASO races, all guns blazing, kicking ass, hiring French riders, etc (How much pressure did this put on the teams to dope?). Mercury fulfilled (almost) every of these criteria and more. They were ranked 13th team in the world (about 21 teams ride the Tour), they won several ASO races, they were sponsored by a former three time Tour winner (Greg LeMond), but they didn't employ any French riders (later, several of their riders would serve drug suspensions—Pavel Tonkov, Niklas Axelsson as well as two others whom I won't name). The ASO passed Team Mercury over that year. Those several million dollars Mercury had spent would have been of better use had they chosen to buy a pile of singles and used them to stoke a furnace. I.e., they left professional cycling and didn't look back. ASO has always sought to place as many French teams in the Tour as possible. Team Mercury's place in the 2001 Tour de France was given to team Big Mat Auber 93—a team that finished dead last in the team competition, won no stages and no jerseys.

Enter the Pro Tour--and the current mess. After the Mercury fiasco the UCI (the organization that sets the rules for cycling) tried to devise a strategy for allowing sponsors to know if they would be allowed to ride the Tour de France. They would like to have you believe it's more complicated than that, but it's not. If you read that last line closely, you'll know that the UCI was, in effect, taking discretionary power away from the ASO—it's subtle, but it's there.
Here's how the Pro Tour was supposed to work (I use the word "was" because it may not exist by the time you read this): The UCI would grant 20, 4-year Pro Tour licenses. To get one of the licenses, a sponsor would have to jump through about 50 financial hoops and would thereby be granted automatic acceptance into the Tour de France. Mercury fiasco solved! Well the wheels started showing signs of falling off almost immediately. The UCI set so many of those financial hoops that they've had to reduce the number of teams they license because not enough teams exist who can make the requirements (this is debatable but look how few teams were ready to take the place of Liberty Seguros and Phonak). Plus, the Spanish teams don't want to enter the spring classics which they are obliged to enter in addition to the Tour de France (not to mention that the spring classics would rather have the smaller Belgian teams who are about 5000 times more likely to throw a rider into the early breakaway—something that the races desperately need), the riders aren't particularly interested in the Pro Tour competition (Danilo Who? This guy won the Pro Tour series competition—one of the red-herring centerpieces of the Pro Tour designed to make you believe the Pro Tour idea has anything to do with something besides the Tour de France), everyone loved the World Cup which was dissolved because of the Pro Tour…
With the Pro Tour, the ASO would have to accept whichever teams the UCI approved. The ASO would still have 2 "wildcard" teams, but they'd rather have 4 (of the wildcards offered by the ASO since the inception of the Pro Tour, how many have been French? If I had about an hour I would look it up but I'm not that crazy) and so everyone should have been happy with that outcome, right?

Let's get a little more deeply into the politics of Professional Cycling, shall we? The groups involved are the UCI, the race organizers, the teams, and the riders.

We've already discussed the UCI pretty extensively. They set the rules, collect fees from the teams and the organizers (I think), oversee drug testing, rank the riders, and organize the World Championships. Their revenues increase when the popularity of cycling increases. Therefore they are hurt whenever a doping scandal occurs (think about that for a second). And they are also hurt when large sponsors leave the sport as in the Mercury fiasco. They paint themselves as benefactors of the sport, but they have a very mixed agenda. They are constantly pushed and pulled by the riders, the teams, the organizers, the fans and their own bottom line. They are on every side of every dispute. They try to protect everyone and in the end the situation is far too complicated for them to manage. In the end they anger everyone.

The Race Organizers… Historically every race had a very separate organizing group. If you wanted to hold a race, you simply picked a date, chose the course, attracted the sponsors, etc, and the riders showed up to race or they didn't. Some races became popular, some didn't. In the 80's and 90's the Tour de France became popular on a scale that began to overshadow nearly every other race on the calendar. At that time the ASO (again, the group that organizes the Tour) began buy up the most important races. Next the organizers of the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta Espagna started to do the same thing to a lesser extent. The ASO was then able to pressure teams to compete in smaller races (thereby increasing those race's revenue potential) in exchange for a chance (remember, kiss the ring—this is not a guarantee) to participate in the Tour. It was a strategy that worked straight down the line. They could blackmail teams into doing the same types of things to ride races like Paris-Roubaix or Leige-Bastogne-Leige. In effect they were saying, "If you want a place in LBL, we expect you to help us by riding the Dauphine Libre (a race which suffers from a slight lack of popularity)" ***I'm speculating a bit here***.

The Teams… The Pro Tour teams especially (as opposed to the 50 or so non-Pro Tour teams), have banded into a loose confederation (so loose that I, me, don't even know its name off the top of my head). They would like to believe that their interests can be aligned but they struggle with this goal. They are in direct competition in too many ways. They compete to win races, to attract riders and to attract sponsors. Yes, they all want cycling to grow, but such abstract notions rarely affect any of their bottom lines enough to force them to work together. They have agreed to two rules which have been most prominent in their agenda. 1) They have agreed that none of them would hire a rider until two years after they have completed any two year drug suspension, and 2) that none would hire a rider involved in the imfamous Operation Puerto affair. The first rule has held pretty firm (with Robert Millar sneaking just barely under the wire, and Tyler Hamilton not) but the second has been broken twice by the same team—your very own Discovery Channel Cycling Team!
The Pro Tour teams are, in effect, being held hostage by the UCI and the organizers at the same time. They owe their precious Pro Tour licenses to the UCI but they owe any publicity they get (for their sponsors) largely to the organizers—especially the ASO! Any power the teams would like to gain by organizing themselves into a bargaining group is probably illusory.
Interestingly, as regards to doping, the teams are beginning to separate themselves into the two camps. One camp contains teams with sponsors who are motivated (and can afford) to deploy internal anti-doping plans, the other contains teams seemingly ready to proceed without such plans. It seems that T-Mobile, (maybe) Gerolsteiner and CSC are so far in the former category and the other 80% of the teams are in the latter (one lower level team, Slipsteam-Chipoltle, has a similar program).

The Riders… I might as well go ahead and say it: The riders don't have any power. Take a look at the railroad job Floyd Landis is involved in and tell me otherwise! I'm not saying Floyd was riding clean; I'm saying that, although it has become a cliché, the Europeans have a very different notion of "due process" than we have in America. Floyd's blood samples were handled in a way that would make a judge laugh hysterically and probably imprison the attorney who presented the evidence.
The main problem with doping is that it's to profitable for the riders who do it. The UCI would need to spend 5 times the amount they currently spend on testing in order to obtain tests that are effective. Since the UCI (and the organizers) are unwilling to pay this price, they seek to increase the penalties to riders who test positive—for unreliable tests! I.e., the UCI wants to employ the "kill them all and let God sort them out" strategy. The assumption is that punishment acts as a deterrent—if the rider is actually taking drugs, all the better. The riders are powerless.
They could organize themselves and then go on strike until they force the UCI to spend $10M on improving testing protocols, right? That's a great idea. That would mean about 15% of current Pro's would out of work the next year (to cover the cost of the new measures) and that the 10%plus Pro's who are currently doping would be done too. How are you going to get solidarity from those numbers. The riders exist in a McCarthyesque world where suspicion equals guilt—and we are suspicious of every rider.


Now you should have enough information to understand the current civil war. Are you ready? This gets complicated. Ha!
The ASO has aligned itself with the other "Grand Tour" organizers to allow about 50 of the top 100 most important races to act collectively. That means if the ASO doesn't want an individual rider or team to race, then that rider or team is shut out of all 50 races. Doing so is a direct threat to the authority of the UCI. After all, they want to be the ones who decide which teams ride where. The teams have paid money to the UCI (obviously not the ASO) in order to guarantee access to certain races. The ASO has decided to exclude certain teams. The UCI has asked the teams to boycott certain ASO races. The teams have some decisions to make. Stay tuned.

Now allow me to speculate on the future. The teams have committed a great deal of money to the Pro Tour concept as has the UCI but the teams are in no position to deny their sponsors the main payoff of sponsorship. The Pro Tour was never anything more than a rearguard action against the capriciousness of the ASO. If everyone is willing to play their individual hands (ASO, the UCI and the teams), then the ASO will win. Here's why: The teams can't exist without the Tour--not for a minute. The ASO could hobble through a year or two of boycotts because they will always be able to invite smaller teams to make the race. They might lose a few sponsors but they are diversified and they would try to make stars out of the lesser riders they could easily recruit. The teams, on the other hand, have sponsors who surely would exercise contract clauses that say, "no Tour equals no money." If they don't have such clauses, I must believe they would find ways to extricate themselves from the sport in very short order.

I've tried to stick pretty closely to the facts until now, but let me speculate on the ASO's motives for a minute. ASO has watched 11 years go by with riders winning their race and then later being implicated in doping scandals. Here's the list. 1996 winner Bjarne Riis admitted in a 2000(?) interview to doping and was known as Mr. 60% (implying that he had used enough drugs to kill a Rhino). 1997 winner Der Kaiser (Jan Ulrich) was implicated in Operation Puerto (not remotely convicted I should add). 1998 winner Il Pirata (Marco Pantani) was implicated in Operation Puerto and died of a self-inflicted cocaine overdose. And then there were Lance and Floyd. The way ASO perceives things, the UCI has done nothing about the doping problem (which probably has eroded the ASO's revenue over the years). Or…they'd like a French rider to win the race sometime in the next 150 years or so.

You want the bottom line? Here it is: We are in for a fuckin' rumble if you ask me. The first battle ground is Paris-Nice in just a few weeks. It's an ASO race, the ASO wants to exclude a specific Pro Tour team, the UCI wants the teams to boycott the race and the teams want exactly what they can't have: they want peace. And as Neville Chamberlain would tell you if he were alive, peace has a price. You can either pay that price by fighting or you can pay the price in what the opposition demands. The teams can't fight. As I said, they have too much to lose in the short term and that is the only term they have. The UCI has to fight because they have made too many promises they can't keep. They have promised the Pro Tour teams that they can ride the Tour! How are they gonna make that happen when the ASO has no intention of being dictated to by the UCI? The ASO has all the cards. If you ask me, the UCI deserves what they get from this. They have constantly written contracts they have no way of enforcing, they have botched the drug problem from the ground up and now they are stomping their feet and demanding respect. And the teams are no better. Patrick Lafevre, the director of Quick-Step, shouts about the plague of doping while he hires Johan Museeuw to handle PR for the team. Admittedly, Johan wasn't convicted until recently but the damning evidence was public knowledge as far back as two years ago. If Lavevre is as squeaky clean as he claims, why did he hire Virenque, Museeuw, VDB, et al? And why do the teams shove riders overboard like chum at the first sign of trouble. No one, not one rider, has been convicted in the Operation Puerto scandal! Even so the teams have strung about a dozen riders up from the yard arm over that stupid thing. The Spanish police tracked this guy Puerto down, exposed his operation, shouted their findings to the press and then had the entire thing thrown out of court. The sport is a clearly a mess.
Here's how we fix the mess:
1) Due process for the riders must be maintained. I don’t care if testing is too difficult, or labs are not perfect, or if you know a doper when you see one. The goal of testing should be to punish the convicted riders and not the accused. Riders should be allowed to race until the day they are convicted. No test results should be made public until the end of the process and penalties should be reduced. If they are leaked, those leaks should be ignored until the process concludes. Conversely, a far higher percentage of the gross income from pro cycling should be committed to improved tests and testing more broadly. The answer isn't more testing, it is better testing and adherence to due process. We should either fight to win the battle or we should give up and allow all drugs. We are in a quagmire.
2) The UCI should be dissolved. They have proven they cannot do the job effectively and they should be fired. Clearly, the sport can exist without them so let's try that. WADA or the IOC could take over for a year until a new organization could be devised. The new organization would be paid for by a percentage from the teams, the organizers and the riders. The new governing body needs to be structured to avoid conflicts of interest and should function as an arbitrator between the parties and not a law unto itself. They announce a positive test in the media and then they ask the same lab to run a second test on the rider's B sample. Lab is motivated to convince everyone they are not idiots and show that their work on the A sample was sound and the UCI is motivated similarly.
3) The teams need to institute internal anti-doping programs, but shouldn't be compelled to do so. Every effort should be made to NOT hire ex-riders as managers and staff for the team. Although this would seem like guilt by association, it may be the only alternative to the "kill 'em all" strategy. Looking through the current staffs of Pro Tour teams sends a shiver down your back. Familiar names from the 80's and 90's comprise 75% of the managers. Would someone ask the owner of the CSC corporation why they have hired Bjarne Riis, an admitted former doper, to be one of the most powerful men in cycling? Pro cycling can be run by non ex-pro's and the riders deserve it.

4) The riders should stop taking drugs. Yeah, that was glib, but I'm not willing to ask much from a bunch of undereducated 20-somethings. I was talking to a friend the other day and I told him I thought that if Tyler Hamilton was doping, it was probably worth a million dollars or more to him for the last 4 years. If he spent $150,000 to pay for the drugs, he was still up over a mil' I'll bet. See, Tyler has never been a prolific winner. If you take away that 8% he may have gained from doping, he may have spent 15 years racing and never won once. In which case he could expect a healthy $100,00/year income for those 15 years. As it was, he only won 3 or 4 races per year. Look at his palmares: He won the Dauphine and one stage, the Tour of Romandy and one stage, one stage of the Tour, one stage of the Giro, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, the Olympic TT and a stage of the Vuelta(?). I may be missing one or two but even so that's not many races for a 10 year career. Ivan Basso is the same way and so is Jan Ullrich. These are guys with incredible talent but winning bike races takes a lot more than a big engine. Have you ever looked at a year-end tally of which riders have won how often? The top rider for the year will usually win around 20 races, the forth rider will win less than 10 and the 10th rider on the list will win 3 races or less. This list includes probably 300 races and most of those will be won by guys who will win just one race a damn year. Winning bicycle races is hard.
All that said, you can't tell me that guys are not going to try to find ways to dope themselves. You are talking about telling a small lie in order to hit the fucking jackpot. Your are talking about a lifetime of financial security, you are talking about fame, you are talking about buying your folks a house, never working another day after you retire at 35.
So let's leave the riders alone on the political side; they have enough problems trying to figure out how to get laid with their chronically skinny bodies and monastic lifestyles.

4) The organizers have to stop trying to clean the plate. They need to impose percentages on themselves toward governing the sport. I.e., they need to put more money back into testing and administrating the sport. Chaos is not a healthy environment for them to move forward within. Yes, they have most of the power and yes, they should reap most of the rewards from the sport, but their greed will only hurt them in the end. The ASO should understand that cycling is an international sport and stop using their race to promote French cycling at the expense of international cycling. It's not the fact that they exclude teams that is the problem. The problem is the capriciousness of their decisions. Sponsors are being asked to make million dollar commitments without guarantees. They won't and they shouldn't.