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.
Andy
Roar Rookie
But if more money was pumped back into teams from TV rights, prize money etc, there would less need to dope to perform to get money. Riders also dope in fear that if they don't perform they won't have a team.
Andy_Roo
Roar Guru
Why do they dope in the first place? MONEY. It's all about money so increasing the prizemoney will not help at all.
Dylan Reynolds
Roar Rookie
It is a noble idea that of increasing the team emphasis but in reality much of the appeal of cycling lies with who is individually the star, be it in the mountains, in the sprints or the GC. Personally I'm not sure about this idea of cycling in crisis given the viewing figures have paradoxically increased the dirtier the sport appears. I agree that there is a need for institutional changes but I think the biological passport for example has been a great step in the right direction and hopefully the Armstrong saga will lead to a broader purge of the old guard. But taking away the individual element acts to the detriment of the sports general appeal.
samwood
Roar Rookie
It was a pity he didn’t really put the boot into UCI at all. He seemed to think he was keeping some of his honour by not dobbing people in. You are right though until UCI is cleaned out there is little hope for a genuinely and believably clean cycling hierarchy. I guess at least it isn’t the only sport which needs this clean out – take Sepp Blatter and FIFA and the farce which is World Cup venue selections!!
Sam
Guest