Dutch bank Rabobank has announced it will quit men’s pro cycling at the end of this year. The team will continue for 2013, only with a blank jersey funded by the contractual obligations left behind.
It’s another shock for the sport, especially since the team was finally trying to put its past behind it. Indeed one of the characteristics of the USADA report and other scandals is that they tend to drive out the good guys. Worse this might not be the last sponsor to flee.
I don’t know much about Lawrence County in South Dakota but I bet they have a drugs problem. The idea of “zero tolerance” sounds good, no? But in fact the risk is that it only entrenches a problem rather than addressing it. Only forget narcotics, this is a cycling blog so let’s think EPO and steroids.
Team Sky have announced they will comb through their rider and staff list and ask them to sign a document stating whether they have had any past or present involvement in doping. It sounds right but could end up achieving the opposite of what’s needed, leaving the cheats in place and the team looking stupid.
With new sponsorship secured for several years, a plan in place and fresh management the future of the Euskaltel-Euskadi team is secure.
Yet in order to survive the team is changing so much that its identity and attitude could be gone. A team famous for its attacking style could now end up with the soul of a spreadsheet and the spirit of a rulebook.
There are some who say that because almost every overall contender in the Tour de France was doping it doesn’t make much difference to the result. They were all at it so the results would have been the same if they were all clean right?
Only no, that’s not true. The idea of a “level playing field” amongst cheats in any sport is a myth so phoney that it has to be reviewed and shot to pieces.
6,000km away from the UCI headquarters in Aigle, Switzerland lie the red roads of Rwanda.
If it’s been a heavy week of revelations, rules and more that takes us too far from what cycling should be about, the film trailer above is a reminder that there so much more. It feels a million miles away from the troubles of pro cycling.
Today brought the news that Johan Bruyneel will stop as general manager of the Radioshack-Nissan team. The decision seems obvious given his name appears 129 times in the USADA reasoned decision but note today’s team press release said he “contests the validity of the procedure as well as the charges against him.”
Yet there good grounds for his departure before the USADA report was published, for example the team’s dismal performance. And if he’s gone, there’s still a team in need of new direction plus the removal of one director on one team only makes us look at the other squads.
Think the USADA case is about the past, with talk of the Tour de France from a decade ago and the retired Lance Armstrong? Maybe it’s over once Johan Bruyneel, Josep Marti and Pedro Celaya complete their hearings?
Wrong. The information released by USADA is so extensive that it will cause aftershocks for months and years to come. Forget the procedural spat between the UCI and USADA and an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport. Instead teams and high profile riders are facing fresh questions and possibly new investigations.
USADA have published their report on the decision to impose a lifetime ban on Lance Armstrong for doping and drug trafficking. The report is extensive and damning, complete with testimony from unimpeachable sources like George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer. Indeed every American cyclist who rode the Tour de France with US Postal and Discovery for the seven year period between 1999 and 2005 has now confessed. Except for Lance Armstrong and Kevin Livingstone.
Yet the report isn’t just about Armstrong. It contains references to his old teams, to senior officials in the sport, from US Cycling across to the UCI and beyond. Over one million dollars in payments to Michele Ferrari are detailed for example.
The report goes into extensive detail, offering a chronology of the US Postal team and Lance Armstrong’s role based on sworn affidavits from 26 people as well as extra information from others, whether media reports or more.
The full report is so damning in its entirety that picking the key points is immaterial, it is the weight of evidence rather than any particular selections that matters. Nevertheless here are some summary points:
I have a mental picture of the cycling calendar where April is packed with racing and August is a sleepy month, the post-Tour de France blues set in and there’s not much going on. But after publishing the calendar of races on Tuesday I toyed with the numbers and the chart above shows the distribution of men’s pro racing throughout the year. It turns out April is a quiet month with just 51 days of racing and August has more days of racing than any other month of the year.
Pro cycling’s off season is arriving but if the racing stops, the planning doesn’t. Whether you’re plotting a victorious classics campaign or a trip to Europe you need to know when the pro races are.
Here’s the 2013 pro cycling calendar. It is blank for October but skip into 2013 and you’ll find the races appear. In addition below you’ll find a link to download an iCal file to import the same calendar into your organiser, phone and computer diary.