Lance Armstrong has confessed. The Oprah Winfrey interview is over. What’s next in this whole saga?
Well with Armstrong’s confession comes all the law suits. All the people he sued will now be suing him back, with interest. He is going to lose tens of millions of dollars.
Then the FBI will come knocking on his door and he will probably face jail time for lying under oath, fraud, etc. But enough about Armstrong.
What now for cycling? We need to forget Armstrong and move on. But how?
A good first step would be a rebuilding the UCI from the ground up. Get rid of the rotten apples that were there in the Armstrong days. And that means pretty much the whole board starting with Pat Mcquaid and Hein Verbruggen.
Verbruggen also has to lose his position with the IOC.
After the UCI is rebuilt with fresh people who care for the sport, measures need to be put in place to ensure corruption and doping can’t occur undetected again.
But then what do you do? You need to think about how to make more rider friendly policies. Instead of individual riders points, make it team points as cycling is a team sport. That way rider contracts don’t depend on the number of points they have contributing to the team’s position in the world tour.
With points being with the teams, riders don’t feel a need of win at all costs to try and keep a contract.
Now that the teams and rider contracts are a bit more stable, the money made from events has to get back to the teams. English Premier League Clubs get more than $50Million a year from television rights.
That’s something that cycling teams should be getting from competing in the World Tour. That would make teams a lot more stable.
Now lets look at Le Tour. The winner of Le Tour gets 450,000 Euro. The Winner of the Champions League gets something like 10,000,000 Euro. Now surely the tour winner is worth something more.
For a clean future in cycling, there needs to be stability. A future that doesn’t involve teams folding every couple of years. A future where generations can go for the same team.
Cycling needs to model itself on other sports and fix itself up. When that happens we will see cycling start to rebound.
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