Patrick Lefevere has been handed a 20,000 CHF fine by the UCI, suspended on condition of a public apology, following a UCI Ethics Commission decision over reports of what the body describes as ‘public comments considered as disparaging towards women’.
The Ethics Commission found that the outspoken Soudal-QuickStep manager had breached article 5 and 6.1 of the UCI Code of Ethics, and has imposed a 20,000 CHF fine.
The fine will be suspended, "on the condition that Mr Lefevere issues a public statement and does not commit a similar breach of the UCI Code of Ethics within the next three years," a statement from the UCI read.
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The UCI statement did not specify the comments in question, however, Lefevere has often courted controversy with his bold public comments - most recently surrounding Julian Alaphilippe’s poor form in recent seasons.
Lefevere’s comments insulated that his performances may have been due to his lifestyle, and placed some of the blame at the feet of Alaphilippe’s partner Marion Rousse.
“Too much partying, too much alcohol…" Lefevere said in an interview with Belgian magazine Humo. "Julian is seriously under the influence of Marion Rousse. Maybe too much."
Rousse, who is the director of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift and a former French national road race champion, hit back at Lefevere’s comments at the time.
"Whatever Mr Lefevere's feelings towards me, it's unacceptable to attack our private lives as he is doing," she said in a reply on Twitter.
“I don't drink alcohol, never have. I don't drink at parties either, because with a three-year-old, we prefer to be on form in the morning.”
Lefevere, who is also part-owner of women's team AG Insurance-Soudal-Quick Step, subsequently walked back on his comments. "This interview was three hours, the passage about Julian was three minutes," Lefevere said. "As always, my Dutch is not always well understood, but maybe I made a mistake to speak about this. I [talked] about November 2022, and it's 2024 now. I understand there is not much news at the moment, so it's 'fressen' as we say in Dutch."
Alongside the decision on Lefevere, the UCI Ethics Commission published its decision on Fazli Ahmad Fazli, president of the Afghan Cycling Federation, where it did not find evidence of a breach of ethics from a humanitarian operation in which the National Federation and the UCI took part in evacuating a number of cyclists and other citizens during political unrest with a government takeover. The commission stated that investigations were ongoing.
Another decision was reached on Mr Alexander Bashenko, president of the Ukrainian Cycling Federation, who was found to have breached the Ethics Code with the "use of insulting language directed at incumbent officials within the National Federation as well as officials of the UCI and the International Olympic Committee (IOC)". He was issued a 5,000 CHF fine and suspended for one year, starting from May 23, 2023.
When contacted about the decision on Patrick Lefevere’s breach by Cyclingnews, there was no initial reaction from Soudal-QuickStep.
