UCI

Shorts: Ballan’s long arms and more

A few snippets and observations this morning.

Ballan in arm warmers

BMC’s clothing
I get plenty of press releases from teams and suppliers these days. Many are useful and informative for the news they bring. Some can include fake-sounding attributed quotes and a few are borderline spam along the lines of “X won Y race because of Z” product. No they didn’t.

But there’s a helpful one from BMC’s kit supplier Hincapie Sports. The US company will continue its sponsorship of the squad for 2012 and their press release stated as such, including beaming quotes from those involved. So far, so normal…

Read more

McQuaid says UCI organising new races to make money

Beijing smog

You might know the UCI has set up a business called Global Cycling Promotions (GCP), apparently promote cycling globally. When they asked what GCP is for, it’s top man (and twitter nice guy) Alain Rumpf replied that it’s about taking the sport to new places. But in a more recent interview UCI President Pat McQuaid gave quite a different explanation.

Read more

Monday shorts, Dirk Hofman time

Half Man Half Biscuit album

Sent in by a reader and posted to twitter, the photo above is from the album sleeve of “90 Bisodol (Crimond)” by British band Half Man Half Biscuit. Dirk Hofman enters pop culture. Bonus points if you can name the biblical art and the artist.

Read more

American anti-doping controls watered down by UCI

Tour of California

There’s a worrying story over on cyclingnews.com about the lack of anti-doping testing in the Tour of California, and also in the Tour of Utah or USA Pro Cycling Challenge in Colorado too. Specifically there were no blood tests and the story says this was because the UCI pulled out of a deal at the last minute with the US authorities, thwarting their plans for comprehensive testing. Read the piece first to make sense of the following.

Read more

UCI threats to sponsors confirmed

McQuaid and Liu Peng

I had to put yesterday’s piece in the conditional tense and use a question mark in the title. That’s no longer necessary given the letters sent by the UCI President Pat McQuaid are now confirmed by further sources… including the UCI itself.

Oddly the UCI started by denying this. When asked about the letters, official spokesman Enrico Carpani told the Velocast:

“I don’t know from where you got this, but I can only firmly deny UCI took such initiative. We are not used to work on this way.“

Read more

2012 UCI pro teams

UCI world tour logo

A press release from the UCI sets out which teams have a World Tour licence for 2012 and which teams have applied to stay in the top flight and which teams want to renew their licence:

Read more

Is the UCI threatening team sponsors?

Pat McQuaid gun

The UCI is traditionally the governing body of the cycle sport but, via a subsidiary called Global Cycling Promotions, is now also staging the Tour of Beijing, making it not merely a governing body that sits above the sport but also a player on the ground with its own business interests.

This conflict of interest has worried some for a while. But now there could be evidence of the extraordinary steps the UCI is taking in order to further its commercial activities.

The Velocast has obtained a copy of the letter that appears to be sent from UCI President Pat McQuaid directly to team sponsors:

Read more

When bad news is good news

A small nugget from the UCI’s annual report, the triumphant report of rising internet traffic to the governing body’s website…

The statistics concerning the www.uci.ch website are also very encouraging. Nearly 2.8 million visits were recorded in 2010 (compared with 2.3 million in 2009). Furthermore, the previous record number of visits in one day was demolished when over 62,000 visits were made on 30 September.

What exciting news happened on 30 September 2010 to cause a rise in web traffic?

Read more

UCI financial accounts published

UCI logo

Accounts are boring but often the money is not. I’ve done the hard work for you and here are some “highlights” of the UCI’s annual financial report.

First note it is from the year ending December 2010, some time ago but the wheels seem to turn slowly in Aigle and despite being approved by auditors in May, it took until September to agree to publish the accounts. Numbers are Swiss Francs (CHF) and today’s exchange rate is at the foot of this piece.

Read more

Avoiding the late season scramble

UCI golden age

The UCI might declare the sport to be in a “golden age” but I see otherwise. Sponsors are staying away from the sport and teams are increasingly reliant on wealthy benefactors for funding. There’s nothing wrong with the sugar-daddy approach but it substitutes corporate sponsorship; many companies might find their audience demographic of cycling is ideal for them but right now they are watching instead of investing.

The shortage of sponsors means there’s still plenty of uncertainty for the 2012 season. Things might fall into place in time for the Tour Down Under but don’t forget a team costs millions to run. For me it seems quite off-putting that several squads don’t know for sure what they’ll be doing next year. If you want to spend millions on a team you need transparency and long term visibility.

Read more

+ More