Monday’s piece on French teams and their future in the sport resulted in plenty of debate. In summary, French teams have modest budgets and operate under a tax system that makes recruiting big names harder. But for all the talk of rising costs and teams struggling to meet a rider’s wage demands here is a fact to ponder on:
The total wage bill for all of the 489 riders in the UCI World Tour is less than the wage bill for l’Olympique Lyonnais, a French soccer club.
Read up on the history of the sport and larger than life characters appear. You don’t just have names, you have nicknames. The “Cannibal”, the “Eagle of Toledo”, the “Butcher of Sens“. Bernard Hinault scared, Mario Cipollini wowed. Nowadays pro cycling just doesn’t seem to have these references and personalities. Today the “The Butcher of Irun” is the man who supposedly supplied contaminated meat to Alberto Contador, not a charismatic racer.
“The Competition Bicycle, a photographic history” is the full title of Jan Heine’s book and this is what the book is all about. It features 34 bikes from the earliest race bikes to modern era machines and there are extensive studio photographs of each machine.
The bike is the star in this book. You might have seen black and white images of Fausto Coppi on his Bianchi or faded colour images of Eddy Merckx on his orange bike in the 1970s but now you can see these bikes in full colour. Each bike gets several pages of photographs with some text to explain history and context of the bike. For example Merckx’s orange frame is labelled “Eddy Merckx” but is actually a De Rosa. The author has taken care to find the authentic machine.
Philippe Gilbert used to ride for FDJ but these days there’s little chance he could go back. The French squad simply doesn’t have the budget to hire him. In an interesting piece on Eurosport.fr, Cofidis manager Eric Boyer says “We don’t have the means the to pay a rider one million a year. It’s an eighth of our budget” whilst Europcar’s manager Jean-René Bernaudeau says that hiring a staff would cost a fortune, “Gilbert, he’d cost our entire team budget“.
France is a nation of 60 million people, Europe’s second largest economy and home to the Tour de France and an extensive calendar of other races. How come the domestic teams have such modest budgets? What is their place in the sport?
I don’t know exactly where we are with cases but having said that there was a discussion that did take place in this building about a number of athletes that are being studied because of their parameter data by the experts because we think that there should be cases opened against them. We have to wait for the process to happen and I can’t tell when or if that will happen, the decision hasn’t been made yet. I can’t say if it’s one, two or three athletes. It’s all at a late process but I don’t know exactly where. It could be weeks or days.
That’s UCI President Pat McQuaid speaking to cyclingnews.com. What is going on?
We have the President who does not know “where we are with cases” but confident enough to brief the media that “cases should be opened“, to say he believes some riders have been doping. Then we hear that we have to “wait for the process to happen” and he doesn’t know if this will go ahead.
Tour of Rwanda
The overall classification was won by the USA’s Kiel Reijnen of Team Type 1 but Joseph Biziyaremye deserves a mention too. That’s him above in Pierre Carey’s photo, just look at the crowd’s reaction as he crosses the line. L’Equipe’s Philippe Le Gars tells the story better than me but if you want it in English, here goes.
Road cycling. We think about cycling all the time but when was the last time you ever considered the road? It is just there. Perhaps you know where the rough sections appear on your riding routes, but what makes one road smooth and another rough? What makes a road?
We’ve had plenty of courtroom reports from Alberto Contador and Jeannie Longo. Riccardo Ricco got a criminal record and a prison sentence. Operation Puerto is being reheated too. All in one week and it’s not yet Friday.
Don’t forget the tale of a breakaway league where some of the big teams in the sport are thinking of setting up on a new version of pro cycling. But it goes without saying the sport is about a lot more than lawyers and bankers. There’s no better example than the Tour of Rwanda.
The British Olympic Association (BOA) is locked in a fight with the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). I wanted to cover this story earlier in the week but there’s been too much other news to fit it in.
In case you’ve missed it, the BOA has a rule saying anyone banned for doping forfeits the right to represent Great Britain in the Olympic Games. But WADA say the ban for a doping offence is two years and that the BOA, in adding an effective life ban, goes beyond this. Consequently WADA has declared Britain a “non-compliant nation”. An embarrassment given the country is set to host the Olympics in 2012.
The risk though is that in seeking to punish British dopers WADA and international efforts to tackle doping are underminded .
Going on the leaked plans received by cyclingnews.com it seems the mooted breakaway league is struggling to get an advantage. As you probably know, anyone can launch an attack, the hard part is making a breakaway last. It’s the same in business, launching a venture is easy but making it work is the hard part.