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Grand tours propose splitting with ProTour . . . again
Just over a year ago the grand-tour organizers, ASO, RCS Sport and Unipublic, announced a new race series based on their three events in an attempt to destabilize the UCI ProTour. The plan was quietly withdrawn when the 20 ProTour teams and the ProTour Council voted against it. Now the Tour-Giro-Vuelta group is taking another tack, announced Tuesday.
The news release starts: “All their attempts at rapprochement with the Union Cycliste Internationale having ended because of the refusal of the latter to return to an open sporting model, and not wanting their events to be part of a closed system called the ‘UCI ProTour,’ RCS Sport, ASO and Unipublic, the organizers notably of the three Grand Tours, have to define the conditions of participation in their principal events, starting in 2007. These conditions help move toward the desired open system wanted by the three national federations [France. Italy and Spain] along with numerous other organizers.”
The proposal revolves around a different method of selecting teams for the 11 races organized by the three groups: Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico, Milan-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix, Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Giro d’Italia, Tour de France, Vuelta a España, Paris-Tours and Tour of Lombardy.
Instead of using the ProTour system whereby the 20 ProTour teams get automatic starts, while only two team slots are open to wild cards for the grand tours and five slots for the classics, the grand-tour group is proposing the following:
a. Starting in 2008, 16 teams will qualify automatically under conditions still being worked out, but based principally on performances in the two previous years. The details of these criteria will be announced before March 1, 2007, after consultation with the teams and the riders.
b. The current 18 ProTour teams will qualify automatically for the 2007 events. (This means that the two teams filling the two open ProTour places, due to be announced by the UCI ProTour Commission on Wednesday, would have to gain wild cards to the grand tours in 2007.)
c. None of the above teams are obliged to start any of the 11 events, but they will have to notify the three organizers of their decisions by December 31 of each year.
d. The organizer of each race reserves the right to refuse a start to any rider, or to any member of a team’s staff, whose presence could threaten the reputation of the event. (This is clearly a proposal to exclude any riders or team officials implicated in Operación Puerto, including Ivan Basso and Jan Ullrich.)
e. The organizer of each event can invite wild cards. For the grand tours, these will be distributed three months before the race start; the number of teams participating cannot exceed 20 (starting in 2008), and 22 in the transition year of 2007.
With these proposed conditions — which are similar to those that existed before the ProTour began in 2005 — it is clear that ASO, RCS Sport and Unipublic are attempting to once more dictate the way forward in professional cycling. The UCI ProTour Council will almost certainly reject the proposal. It remains to be seen whether the teams and the riders take a different view. Without their acceptance, the whole ProTour/grand-tour debate will be more astringent than ever.
