IOC denies asking for track events to be cut

The dispute over the removal of the kilometre and 500m time trial from the Olympics in Beijing is getting more complex, with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) denying claims by the UCI's Pat McQuaid that it specifically asked for track events to be culled.

Yesterday, McQuaid was quoted by BikeBiz.com as saying, "They [the IOC] came to us 18 months ago asking for the inclusion of BMX. We agreed to that and knew we'd have to drop two medals to accommodate BMX. We didn't make any decision at the time. We tried to brazen it out with the IOC, hoping they'd forget about events having to be excluded. It was the IOC who told us to exclude track events, not road, because the women's 500m, for instance, was only introduced [into the Olympics] at Sydney [in 2000]."

But an IOC official denied this was the case to Sportcal.com: "Requests for changes to the Olympic programme come from the federations, in this case the UCI. They came to us wanting to put BMX on the schedule," the official said.

BikeBiz.com, which handed its 10,000 signature petition arguing for the reinstatement of the kilo and 500 to both the UCI and IOC, claims that in January, 2005, "the UCI had already discussed it would be track events culled from the Olympics, not road. But, in the March survey to the 24 national cycle federations, the list of events which federations could vote on to cull, road events were included. National federations were not told any vote for a road event would not be counted.

"It's believed the majority of federations voted to exclude the road time trial with only a small proportion voting for the exclusion of the kilo. However, once the UCI removed all the votes for the road time trial the next highest events to be culled were the kilo and the women's 500m track time trial," wrote Carlton Reid of BikeBiz.com.