The sky didn’t fall (sort of)

After a few rounds of threats back and forth, the UCI and Tour de France promoter Amaury Sport Organisation made nice at a last-minute meeting in Brussels on March 5. Six days later, ASO-owned Paris-Nice went ahead more or less as planned, with 19 out of 20 ProTour teams taking part and only Unibet getting overtly hosed.

Now would be a good time to check eBay for “ProTour license”.

Anyways, the actual bike racing turned out to be as entertaining and suspenseful as anyone could have hoped for and there was a general feeling of relief that The Sport Of Professional Cycling had dodged a bullet. Good times!

But of all the subplots that emerged during the pre-race standoff, the most ironic came from an interview with UCI president Pat McQuaid in the March 12 issue of VeloNews. In the article, McQuaid related a story that he’d heard from another cycling official that, back in 2004, ASO president Patrice Clerc had been willing to commit ASO’s events to the ProTour until he received a last-minute warning from Philippe Amaury, the media mogul and ASO’s namesake, in which Amaury threatened to fire Clerc for “giving away [ASO’s] assets.”

What really blew my mind about this story was that McQuaid presented it as some sort of nefarious conspiracy on the part of the late Mr. Amaury and his equally rapacious widow to undermine the purity and altruism of the sport of cycling. Excuse me?

The Tour de France began as a stunt to sell newspapers and it continues today because it turns a healthy profit for ASO. Wikipedia describes Mr. Amaury as “a French publishing tycoon and entrepreneur who dominated the French media world”, so my suspicion is that he didn’t get rich by allowing his employees to hand out his companies’ assets for cacahuètes.

Not only is there nothing wrong with that – after all, no one is criticizing this magazine for not giving away free advertising – it’s actually better for you as a cycling fan. Because the Tour de France is a profit-seeking entity, ASO must continue to provide compelling entertainment in order to maintain its audience. If the public loses interest, the television rights lose value, the sponsors jump ship, and there goes the bike race. In other words, the burden is on ASO to put on a bike race that its customers – i.e. you – want to watch.

But for Pat McQuaid to scoff at ASO’s desire to receive compensation in exchange for its assets implies that UCI takes issue with the very idea of cycling as for-profit entertainment. Companies like ASO are not without their faults, but if our friendly neighborhood international governing body gets its way, cycling fans might end up receiving the same level of customer service offered by any other self-sacrificing, profit-ignoring bureaucracy…like the DMV.