Cycling set for a showdown

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President or Sheriff?(Image credit: Bettini Photo)

Cycling seems less like a sport these days and more like a Hollywood western: the battle between the Wyatt Earp of cycling, UCI president Pat McQuaid, and the cattle-rustlin' cowboys of race organisation, the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), is set for the grand climax at this weekend's Paris-Nice. Life in Tombstone has become dangerous indeed in the past few weeks, and the townspeople - the riders and teams - have been forced into a position of diving for cover (see Track hopefuls skip Paris-Nice) or simply going about their daily business of racing while the bullets fly overhead.

At stake is the future of not just the ProTour, but of the very authority of the UCI. The ASO has calmly gone about moving the race out from under the UCI's grasp while the governing body, backed into a corner, has fought back with threats of sanctions against the riders, the teams and even the French Cycling Federation. The ProTour teams association (IPCT) appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) asking that it rule on the legality of the UCI's proposed sanctions, but CAS declined to take on the matter.

What's left is for the riders to either toe the line on Sunday or not, and according to the AIGCP (Association of Professional Cycling Teams), the majority of the riders are in favour of taking the start. Whether the UCI will actually fine and suspend those on the start list remains to be seen, but the riders have already sought protection against any repercussions should the sanctions go through.

Way back in 2004, ASO's Christian Prudhomme explained, "The ProTour is a closed four year system with no possibility of up or downgrading teams," he said. "If a team has a bad year, it still remains within the ProTour, but another team getting great results cannot move up into it. Instead of applying a similar system to soccer for example, [then UCI president] Hein Verbruggen chose to imitate the American closed structures of NBA, NHL or NFL. He also followed their franchise system, that he calls 'licenses'. And he obliges race organisers and teams to pay these rather costly licenses."

We've heard Prudhomme and ASO boss Patrice Clerc rail against the "closed" system for the past four years, but wasn't that all solved when the races organised by the GTs were removed from the ProTour calendar? Not exactly, because while the UCI placed most of the GTs races on a separate calendar which allowed for organisers to invite more Professional Continental teams, they still insisted that all ProTour teams be invited to race the Tour de France.

After tense negotiations, the GTs plan was put on hold, and the Giro d'Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España were included in the ProTour during 2006 and 2007 after the UCI made a compromise. They agreed to reduce the number ProTour licenses from 20 to 18, opening up more wild card slots for the organisers, and to consider handing out licenses with a shorter term than the original four years, opening up the system to more teams.

In a last minute negotiation, a temporary peace deal was arranged where the GTs would recognise the original 18 ProTour teams and treat the last licenses, Astana and Unibet.com as wild cards. In reality, that meant Astana was allowed entry into the Tour de France while Unibet stayed on the sidelines. The decision came back to haunt the ASO when Astana's Alexander Vinokourov tested positive for blood doping during the Tour and the team withdrew from the event.