Sorry about that whole ProTour thing

Time certainly has flown since I first put finger to keyboard for the April 2005 issue of this fine publication, and much has changed in cycling. Lance retired, followed by Operacion Puerto and the Floyd scandal kicking off the post-Lance era, but we’ve also been blessed with the Tour of California and Neil Browne’s MySpace.

Before any of these momentous developments, though, there was a time when I had a good feeling about the UCI’s newfangled ProTour concept, which is now in disarray after failed negotiations over team selections for Paris-Nice, perhaps foreshadowing similar stalemates over the Grand Tours themselves.

Looking back a couple years, I actually spent two columns, June and July 2005, discussing the ProTour’s potential benefits for teams owners and race promoters. Here’s how I began the first piece:

“So the UCI ProTour is off to … a start. With the Grand Tours and a few other races still keeping their distance, whether it’s a good start will be decided only in hindsight. But at the very least, the plan makes sense to Lance Armstrong, who’s called it ‘the future of cycling.’

“Essentially, the ProTour tries to crystallize complicated sets of overlapping events and a constantly shifting group of teams into a coherent league that can compete on the world stage against sports with stronger central management.”

Clearly, the ProTour did not get off to a good start, and even my guarded hopefulness from the spring of 2005 now seems naïve. If I got your hopes up as well, I apologize.

Not that turning cycling into a “coherent league” is a bad idea. In fact, such a system might make even more sense now than it did two years ago, with recent doping scandals having further exposed the need for a clear power structure in the sport. And the economic arguments – more predictable exposure for team owners and sponsors, and revenue sharing for race promoters – still pencil out.

Nonetheless, it appears that both the UCI and ProTour optimists such as myself forgot a crucial point: the Tour de France is in charge. More specifically, Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO) is in charge, since they own and operate the Tour, the event that drives pretty much everything in professional cycling.

The Tour’s brand equity, the global value of its image and reputation, is the single most valuable asset in the sport and anyone who makes a dime off pro bike racing owes at least a couple cents to ASO. For example, the public sponsorship information webpage for Jonathan Vaughters’ Slipstream presented by Chipotle team already touts their selection for the 2009 Tour.

But that’s just Le Tour, let alone the values of ASO’s 10 other major races like Paris-Nice and Paris-Roubaix, plus the values of the Giro and the Vuelta, both of which have sided with ASO against the UCI. In fact, those three organizers control 74 of the 151 days of racing originally intended for the 2007 ProTour. Clearly, those 77 other days – about half of which are weekday stages of minor races like Tirreno-Adriatico and the Tour of Poland – provide only a fraction of the ProTour’s overall value.

So where does this leave the UCI? Their position in the world has its roots in the International Olympic Committee’s notions of the purity of amateur athletics, but those notions are obsolete in the modern world of professional sports as for-profit entertainment. In today’s pro cycling, the assets directly controlled by the UCI – the trademark of the rainbow stripes and the oversight of Olympic selections – are of minimal value compared to those controlled by the Grand Tours’ organizers.

Although most ProTour teams stuck with the UCI when it came to Paris-Nice, they simply cannot afford to miss out on the Grand Tours, and those organizers will soon realize that they can create their own ProTour-esque system by negotiating directly with the teams. But public concern over doping gives the UCI a little bit of leverage, and they might have a shot at carving out a role for themselves as an independent provider of anti-doping protocols if they allow the Grand Tours to run the show. If the UCI fights this process, they will have to face the reality of their weak economic position.

In other words, doping is arguably the only reason that the UCI should have any more power over professional cycling than what FIBA, the UCI’s basketball counterpart, has over the NBA. Which would be none.

In recent public statements, UCI president Pat McQuaid has boasted that the UCI is not in it for the money and has criticized ASO for pursuing their self-interest. What’s so great about that first thing and so bad about the second? The UCI is nominally cycling’s governing body, but they govern as if they’re running a state-controlled economy. However, modern pro cycling is a free market where individuals and corporations pursue their own interests and seek to maximize profits, and the UCI will have to adapt to this new reality.