Brian Cookson has insisted the UCI was not prepared to pay full legal costs for the former president Hein Verbruggen as part of an agreement to resolve their differences, while conceding cycling’s governing body was prepared to stump up a small “symbolic” sum.
A report on the website insidethegames.biz stated Verbruggen was to receive £29,000 from UCI to reimburse him for legal steps taken to rebut the CIRC report. Cookson said Verbruggen’s demand had been deemed unreasonable and accused him of meddling in the UCI’s affairs counter to the terms of the peace deal. “Hein wanted us to pay money towards his costs, I said we might pay a small amount, he came back with a figure and we said no. We might have made a small gesture of goodwill but not 40,000 Swiss francs.
“The agreement was falling down anyway because Hein hasn’t respected his side of the bargain. We have evidence that he was involving himself in UCI politics, and as far as I’m concerned the agreement is null and void. We haven’t paid any money. Absolutely not.”
Cookson confirmed the UCI had met Verbruggen to resolve its differences following publication of the Cycling Independent Reform Commission report, which produced a damning analysis of Verbruggen’s relations with the disgraced former Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. “The IOC asked us to meet him because he was getting crosser and crosser over the CIRC report, so we met with a third party from the IOC. We weren’t going to remove the CIRC report from the public domain, Hein has had his say with the website he has created and we’ve put a link to that off our website.”
Cookson added that while Verbruggen remains the UCI’s honorary vice-president, he believes the organisation has broken the link to the man who was at its head from 1991 to 2005. “He may hold the position but it is a meaningless title. It’s not in my gift to remove it. He doesn’t receive UCI papers, and he doesn’t have access to UCI papers. He has no influence on the UCI and he will continue not to do so as long as I remain UCI president.”
Verbruggen went on the offensive again on Wednesday, insisting the £29,000 payment had been agreed and describing Cookson’s argument as “fabricated”. He told insidethegames.biz that “both Cookson/UCI and Verbruggen have executed all obligations under that agreement except that the UCI did not pay the agreed contribution to Verbruggen’s costs”. He added he had never been informed by Cookson that in the latter’s view he had done something in breach of the agreement brokered by the IOC. For Cookson, the Verbruggen dispute is merely a little local difficulty compared to relations with the Tour de France organisers Amaury Sport Organisation, which has said it will remove its events from the UCI’s elite WorldTour in 2017. Races on their roster such as the Tour and the Vuelta a España, plus Classics such as Paris-Roubaix and Liège-Bastogne-Liège would, said ASO, be run as part of the second-tier hors catégorie calendar, which would give them greater control over which teams were accepted.
Given that ASO’s events make up 61 of the 148 days in the WorldTour – a semi-franchise system which guarantees the top 18 teams in the world access to all its events – ASO’s move would effectively make the WorldTour meaningless. Cookson said he believes a solution can be found but that ASO needed to tread carefully. “I was elected to stop conflict in the sport and I will keep talking. With discipline and diplomacy we can sort the problem. I don’t want to get into a war with ASO but if they want to be part of the development of cycling they need to think about their place in it.”
Cookson hoped an agreement could be in place by spring. “We can talk about team numbers, field sizes and so on but I’m worried that is window dressing. I don’t think their move is a helpful one and I wonder if they’ve thought it through properly. Have they looked at all the rules? The maximum distance for HC events is 200km, so are they going to shorten Paris-Roubaix or the longer Tour stages? They can’t pick and choose which rules apply to them if they want to be part of the sport.”
The agreement reached recently over the future of the WorldTour allows for its expansion, which is a sticking point for ASO. “It’s not that radical,” Cookson said. “It’s about a progressive and sustainable development of the sport which protects the wonderful heritage of our sport.The Tour de France will always be the greatest race in the cycling firmament but there has to be potential for other races to come into the WorldTour [as well]. Perhaps ASO won’t organise all the new events, but we want to make everyone economically stronger, not just one private company. No one is trying to damage them, we are trying to grow the sport around them.”