Cycling and the ACC report: No room for complacency

My friend Phillip Gomes has given voice to a feeling that’s undoubtedly going round the Australian cycling community.

While acknowledging the “massive decades-long problem deeply embedded in its culture”, and stating that we do not “have a right to be smug”, he, like me, has enjoyed a guilty moment’s schadenfreude with the Australian Crime Commission report indicating widespread PED abuse in Australia’s major professional sporting codes.

And, geez, cycling fans and riders are owed a moment or two of such schadenfreude!

Welcome to our world, fans of the AFL and NRL – a world where every extraordinary performance is immediately second-guessed, where it’s assumed that every weekend warrior is on the gear, and that your sport is as credible as the WWF.

For all the myriad failings of cycling’s administration – which are still yet to be fully played out in the realms of international sports politics – the sport has been dragged kicking and screaming to an at least partially effective PED policy.

There is much more work to do, don’t get me wrong. However, the broader cycling community – through year upon year of very bitter experience – can reasonably claim to be years ahead of where the Australian professional sporting codes are on this issue.

But even beyond the work remaining to deal with doping in cycling, there’s a sleeper issue raised in the ACC report, one that may blow up in cycling’s face if it doesn’t get its act together. Because what, in other sports, would be regarded as match-fixing goes on at all levels of cycling.

It’s nominally against the rules, but is widely ignored, and its existence is rarely acknowledged to outsiders.

At its most basic, there’s the time-honoured tradition of “the chop”. For a breakaway to succeed, it’s vital that all riders within the break contribute as much as they can, at least until the bunch is discouraged from the chase.

However, if one rider within the breakaway is heavily favoured to win – say they pack a strong sprint, or are better climbers on an uphill finish – and this is widely known, the bunch will not work together.

So what usually happens is that there is an agreement made that the bunch will work together, and regardless of the finishing order if the break stays away the prize money collected will be split.

The legality of this is not really clear under cycling’s frankly rather opaque and poorly organised rulebooks, but the practice is widely accepted in amateur cycling.

Similarly, there’s no doubt, and little controversy, about the practice of professional riders aiming for the overall race win “gifting” stage wins to breakaway companions. Alberto Contador has made an art form of this, particularly at the Giro and Vuelta.

Where things start to get murkier is at the professional level where riders act as temporary teammates for cash. While Cadel may have ultimately won the race, the best stage of the 2011 Tour de France was undoubtedly Andy Schleck’s solo win on Stage 18, with his audacious solo attack 60 km from the finish.

What was little appreciated at the time, however, was the help Schleck received on the headwind false flat section before the final climb. Schleck was paced through this section by two riders.

His teammate Maxime Monfort was just doing his job; but non-teammate Dries Devenyns slogged his guts out pushing the wind out of the way for Schleck for no obvious gain for himself, nor anyone else on his team. While Devenyns, Schleck, and the respective team managements aren’t likely to tell us any time soon, there’s no doubt that some kind of arrangement was worked out for Devenyns to contribute his efforts.

Most concerning of all, is the practice of paying riders to not contest wins. While this is very rarely discussed, occasionally mentions of it slip out into the public domain.

Aside from Lance Armstrong himself, who is alleged to have paid off other riders to ensure that he won a third American race and collect a bonus for winning the “triple crown”, Australian champion Peter McDonald was offered $25,000 by Michael Rogers to not contest a two-up sprint from the title, and Robbie McEwen recounts he and Baden Cooke offering each other money to cease contesting the green jersey of the 2003 Tour de France.

While, in these two Australian cases, the deal wasn’t actually done. But in each case there’s no sense that the riders concerned would have thought it unethical were the deal to be accepted.

The UCI rule on this, at least, is pretty clear. As noted here on the case of the alleged payoff of Aleksandr Kolobnev Alexandre Vinokourov, “Riders shall sportingly defend their own chances. Any collusion or behaviour likely to falsify or go against the interests of the competition shall be forbidden.”

But enforcement of this rule is somewhere up with the UCI’s attitude to EPO in the late 1990s.

There hasn’t been a major cycling gambling scandal yet, but cycling’s history, tactics, and culture make it ripe for the plucking by those who might manipulate betting markets for their own advantage.

The time to act is now. For once, cycling can observe the dodgy practices getting wide negative publicity and get its house in order before the wider world points it out to us.

The review into Cycling Australia, and the suggestion to establish a permanent ethics and integrity panel, points the way forward locally.

So does a more expansive rule clearing up what kind of cooperation really does “sportingly defend one’s one chances” and what really is unacceptable. But global action falls within the purview of the UCI.

Given that, I think the safest bet is a new type of cycling scandal emerging a few years down the line. But, like newly-elected UCI Oceania rep Tracey Gaudry, one can at least dream of a better-governed sport dealing with problems before they become publicly messy.