The Cycliste Moderne, December 12, 2005

They Finally Did It.

Friday, the ASO, RCS and Unipublic, the organizers of the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a Espana respectively, all announced that they were withdrawing the grand tours and the other races they produce from next season’s ProTour calendar. As a result, eleven of the twenty-seven events that were part of the first ProTour calendar in 2005 have been withdrawn. These races represent not only the Grand Tours but also such stage races as Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico and one day classics as Milan-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and the Tour of Lombardi.

The Grand Tour organizers have announced that all twenty ProTour teams will be invited in 2006 to all three of the Grand Tours but that beginning in 2007, only fourteen teams will gain automatic entry based upon a performance system the Grand Tour organizers have yet to announce. Up to eight wild cards will be awarded. The Grand Tour organizers have announced additional prize money to all teams taking part in all three Grand Tours and an overall team prize system.

Neither the Ronde Van Vlaanderen nor the Amstel Gold Race are produced by any of the Grand Tour organizers, so they remain part of the ProTour, but with the absence of arguably the most significant races of the season with those two exceptions, the ongoing survival of the UCI’s ProTour is in question. UCI officials and team officials will be meeting over the next couple of weeks to discuss the past season and where the sport is headed.

However, former UCI president Hein Verbruggen, the father of the ProTour, is clearly in denial as to the impact of the withdrawal by the Grand Tour organizers. Procycling.com reports his response to their actions was to deny any impact on the ProTour: “We haven’t lost face. They have, they have lost this battle.” Verbruggen went on to criticize Grand Tour organizers as becoming “American” for their willingness to pay teams to participate.

As my observant wife commented, “Isn’t this a lot like what happened when they created the Indy Racing League?” Indeed, organizers of the preeminent sporting events typically think their events are more important that the sport itself; at the same time the teams and individuals participating in the sport think that the events cannot happen without top talent. In the end, the promoters and the participants end up destroying the sport unless someone blinks.

It will be interesting to see who prevails in this fight. It cannot be denied that the ProTour resulted in the best and most international fields that the Giro and Vuelta have ever had. Although the Tour has become the Super Bowl of cycling, with the best riders in the world and the one event that even casual fans can comprehend and follow, the Italian and Spanish tours have suffered over the years due to their much more national focus. Clearly, the ProTour benefited the big teams to the detriment of the smaller teams. It is questionable if there really are twenty top level teams in the world when the T-Mobiles and Discovery Channels are running programs with budgets in excess of $15 million each year while the Saunier Duvals are running their programs on less than a fifth of that.

Watching this kind of destructive behavior makes you feel like Charlton Heston at the very end of Planet of the Apes.

Psychlocross

Some of the Friday events of the United States Cyclocross Championships in Rhode Island had to be postponed as weather conditions worsened during some of the master national championship races. Visibility declined to zero, the course markings were destroyed and medical officials were overwhelmed with cases of hypothermia. When you decide to have the national championships in cyclocross in Rhode Island two weeks before Christmas, odds are you are going to have sleet, ice and snow. The chance of death and frostbite is the real reason that cyclocross races are less than an hour long.

And now for something completely different . . .

The World Cup draw was held on Friday. For the Americans, it will be difficult to replicate their results of 2002 where they made it to the quarterfinals. Drawn in probably the second toughest group, the Americans get to play Italy, the Czech Republic and Ghana. At a minimum, the Americans will need a win and a draw to go through to the Second Round. A win and a draw, however, would at best result in a second place finish in the group and a date with Brazil in the Second Round. The Americans have improved significantly over the last eight years and can play with just about any team in the world on a neutral field. With the eight hour time difference between Boise and Germany, I will likely get to watch the first match of the day without interfering with work. It is those pesky mid-day matches that will get in the way of the law.