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Pro Cycling After COVID

Former UCI President Brian Cookson and Steve Maxwell take a look at what cycling in general, and pro cycling in particular, could look like after we emerge from the COVID era. Over the course of the last several months, there has been a good deal of speculation, prognostication and tentative optimism about how the present COVID era may affect cycling over the longer-term future. As with almost all other aspects of society, it has become something of a cottage industry and regular armchair activity to predict the post-COVID future. Much has been made about the historical tendency of mass pandemics or other global catastrophes to alter the course of history. They have often led to transformative new technological or social innovations, or dramatic new ways of thinking and behaving. Indeed, the origins of the bicycle itself can be traced to just such an historical upheaval. Some things...

The UCI Election: Time to Cast the Votes

In about a week, the national federations comprising the Union Cycliste International (UCI) will vote in Bergen, Norway to elect their next President. Incumbent Brian Cookson, now completing his first term as President, faces off against David Lappartient – the former President of the French Cycling Federation (FFC), the current President of the European Cycling Union (UEC), and also a Vice President of the UCI itself. In this article, we evaluate each candidate’s record – based upon their stated positions on the key issues, historical statements to the press and public, as well as comments and recommendations from interviews which we conducted with each candidate over the past two weeks.  In the final section, we recommend and endorse the candidate who we believe is best-suited to guide the UCI and shape the next four years of global cycling. Brian Cookson has been credited for his...

The CIRC Report: A Missed Opportunity

There has already been considerable comment and reflection on the much anticipated CIRC report – and reactions have predictably varied across the spectrum.  But there seems to be general agreement that the published report has finally validated a relevant and cohesive historical narrative about doping and the role of the UCI – even if many of the facts and figures were already fairly well known around the cycling community.  Unfortunately, the formal recommendations offered by the report, which were intended to be the main focus of the overall project, fall far short of expectations. It is important first to look back at what the CIRC was originally chartered to do, and how the final report addresses those specific tasks and objectives. In terms of the first of its three major objectives – which were discussed on page 16 of the report, and as generally laid out in the original “Terms...

Nineteen Eighty-Three

Brian Cookson, president of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), has stated that its newly-minted Cycling Independent Reform Commission (CIRC) will look approximately fifteen years back in time, as it attempts to understand and address cycling’s modern doping dilemma.  This time frame neatly coincides with the low points of the Lance Armstrong era, but the root causes go much deeper than one man.  Fifteen years may help the UCI to pinpoint and investigate the sinister activities and possible collusion that occurred in cycling’s darkest days, but the CIRC must review about thirty years of history to truly understand and fix the corruption that has poisoned the sport, and to bring about lasting reform. The strange, totalitarian world envisioned by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four  might seem like pure fiction, but cycling embarked upon its own “Cold War” and dystopian journey in...