The UCI’s decision to suspend all Russian and Belarusian teams after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has had an immediate effect, with the Gazprom-RusVelo team not starting the Trofeo Laigueglia race in Italy on Wednesday morning.
The Russian ProTeam was listed on the official start list on Tuesday but did not line up for the Italian one-day race. The team had selected Russian riders Sergei Chernetski, Nikolay Cherkasov, Italians Giovanni Carboni, Nicola Conci and Alessandro Fedeli, and Czech riders Michael Kukrle and Mathias Vacek, winner of a stage at the UAE Tour last week.
Gazprom-RusVelo, which is sponsored by the Russian state-majority owned energy consortium Gazprom, has not yet issued any reaction to the ban or talked about their plans for the future. However, the team’s bike and wheel suppliers Look and Corima had already pulled their backing of the team.
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It is unclear if the riders will now try to find places in other teams. Vacek has already been linked to WorldTour teams for 2023, while Gazprom-RusVelo team leader Ilnur Zakarin has arguably the best chance of finding a new team, though he has already intimated that he planned to retire at the end of 2022.
Under the UCI sanctions, Russian athletes in non-Russian teams are allowed to race. However the prohibition of national emblems, flags and anthems also means that Russian time trial champion Aleksandr Vlasov (Bora-Hansgrohe) will not be able to wear his national champion’s jersey. Riders holding multiple nationalities will be able to request a change to their sporting nationality.
Before the start of the Trofeo Laigueglia, the race held a minute's silence as a sign of respect to the victims of war.
“We’re convinced that sport has to always carry a message of peace and that athletes don't have to passively suffer events just because they come from geographical location or another,” the mayor of Laigueglia Roberto Sasso Del Verme said in a statement.
The Drone Hopper-Androni Giocattoli team wore a special replica version of Andrii Ponomar's Ukrainian national champion’s jersey when they signed on before the Trofeo Laigueglia, with the words ‘#nowar’ across the bottom.
Ponomar is not riding the Trofeo Laigueglia, but the team wanted to show its support to the Ukrainian rider. Ponomar is training in Italy but his father is on the front line fighting for Ukraine and his family has been forced to take shelter in a bunker near their home north of Kiev.
"We have expressed all our solidarity with Andrii Ponomar and his nation. We regard Russia's invasion of Ukraine as shameful,” team manager Gianni Savio said.
“We hope this absurd war will end as soon as possible, so that the Ukrainian people can return to live in peace and freedom.”
