Cheerio UCI

tunney

All ProTour teams are leaving and not renewing their licences.

Game over for UCI.........

Caroline_ie

http://www.bikeradar.com/news/article/17-teams-leave-uci-protour-series-17551

ouch

Hermy

Is this a good thing?
Will professional cycling be better without the UCI?

penexpers

hurrrah! Never been a fan of the uci. They were a bit toothless when it came to the issue of drugs.

rp

Hermy wrote: »

Will professional cycling be better without the UCI?

I guess so, if recumbents were allowed in the TdF, they wouldn't need as much pharmaceutical support to do the same times. UCI has prevented bike technology moving on from Eddie Merxx's day.

tunney

penexpers wrote: »

hurrrah! Never been a fan of the uci. They were a bit toothless when it came to the issue of drugs.

Thats the stupidest statement I've heard in a long time.

ASO have been good about doping? They've handled things well? I think not.
All of cycling was bad about doping not just UCI.

penexpers

tunney wrote: »

Thats the stupidest statement I've heard in a long time.

ASO have been good about doping? They've handled things well? I think not.
All of cycling was bad about doping not just UCI.

They have tried a damn side harder to stamp out doping than UCI. The UCI's response to the Festina affair was laughable at best. If they had have been strong on doping then we wouldn't have had the farce of 1990s cycling.

Chips Lovell

They're leaving the Pro Tour, not the UCI.

penexpers

Pat McQuaid is indicating they'll be excluded from the UCI too.

blorg

Pat McQuaid needs to get some cop on in that case; if all the current ProTour teams unanimously leave the ProTour he has limited bargaining potential and should accept reality and be working on some sort of compromise he could be coming up with to keep UCI relevant. He should have seen this coming when his threats over Paris-Nice were ignored by everyone.

Concern has been raised by the organisers of some of the second-tier races though they existed before the ProTour and I'm sure they will continue to exist after it.

Chips Lovell

The UCI needs to sit down with the teams and hammer this out before we get into a breakaway federation situation.

When this whole row first started back in the winter of 2006, I was kind of sympathethic to the UCI position and thought that ASO were just getting a bit greedy. However, as time's gone on, I'm less enthused by the current Pro Tour setup.

First of all, I can completely see the view of the race organisers who feel overly restricted having to invite a growing number of Pro Tour teams to their races. For example, a lot of Spanish and French teams aren't particuarly interested in the Giro, while you have a whole load of Italian teams who would bust a gut in the Giro but can't get in because the likes of Euskaltel or Credit Agricole are using it as a training race.

Secondly, I'm not at all gone on the efforts to globalise the Pro Tour. The European calendar is already packed with big races that have a long history and a huge following. Sending teams packing off to Australia, Russia, the US or China is not what the riders want and not, I'd suspect, what most fans want. They were already pressurising the Spanish to shorten the Vuelta.

Great races aren't created by the UCI, they evolve over time because there is something special about them. You can see this with the Monte Paschi Eroica. It's only in its second year, but already people are talking about it and big names targetting it as one to win. And it didn't need a Pro Tour designation to get this reputation.

The UCI needs to realise that if it doesn't give way a little here, it could lose the whole lot.