UCI versus ASO
March 11th, 2007 |I am not going to go into all the details describing who the UCI is (they govern the sport of bicycle racing worldwide) or who ASO is (they promote the Tour de France as well as some other professional races) or what the entire brouhaha about the ProTour war is all about (you can read it all here).
What I will tell you is that professional bike race promoters, be it ASO or RCS Sport (promoter of the Giro d’Italia/Tour of Italy) or Unipublic (promoter of the Vuelta España/Tour of Spain) want to have the ability to invite whom they choose to their own races.
It’s acknowledged that the Tour de France is the biggest bike race in the world, bar none. It’s the longest in terms of distance, it’s 3 weeks in duration, it’s the most watched live annual sporting event in the world, it generates the largest amount of publicity for the sport and the amount of sponsorship dollars involved are astronomical. So it is only natural that the best teams should be invited to take part in the race.
But the Tour de France is not the world championship of stage racing. It’s a French race and the French want the final say in who gets to take part in their event. The same goes for the Italians and the Spanish. Not inviting the majority of top teams to take part in the event would take away from the legitimacy and history of the race. Most of the ProTour teams deserve to be invited to take part. But there is also a history of inviting smaller French teams to take part in the event as well. If the French want to bring a smaller team into the race in order to support French cycling and add some local flavor to the race I see nothing wrong with that. Again, it is a French race. The Italians and the Spanish grand tour promoters want, and are fighting along side the French for that same right.
Additionally, contrary to what one would assume, the very fact of being a ProTour team does not guaranty that the team is one of the best. The concept of the ProTour is to grant a license to a team for a four year term. This allows the team to “sell’ its services to a sponsor with a four year contract thus providing the sponsor with the security of knowing that their brand will see action in the top races for those four years no matter what. However, for any numbers of reasons (rider injury, rider contract dispute, poor morale, bad luck) if the team is having a bad year the Tour de France is still obligated to accept their entry into to race under the rules of the ProTour in place of another team that is not a ProTour team but is actually having much more success.
Fundamentally, this issue is about maintaining control of the race to those who are promoting the event. I can’t argue with the position that ASO, RCS Sport or Unipublic have taken in regards to this issue.
