While the Tour de France is tailor-made for watching on MythTV with a time-stretch of 110%, making it 10% faster to watch (and thereby reducing 66 minutes of footage to an hour) without any change in audio pitch, it’s hard to take on board the intrigues unfolding in front of my eyes.
The other day, I reported that the German public broadcasters, ARD and ZDF had abandoned the Tour. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that void has already been filled by the German commercial station, SAT1. Nothing bizarre there.
But today, an attempt was made to have to have Michael Rasmussen removed from the race! As we Dutch might say, Het moet niet veel gekker worden.
So, what happened?
The UCI, the Union Cycliste Internationale, is the governing body of all national cycling federations, including the Danish one. It also organises all ProTour races and therefore strives to maintain a closed set of races involving a fixed roster of teams.
The national federations are responsible for carrying out out-of-competition doping tests on all riders that they have licenced to race. In the case of the Danish federation, this includes Michael Rasmussen.
Now, to carry out these tests, the cycling federations need to know where all licenced riders are at all times, so that they can swing by to tap blood and urine at any time.
Here’s where it gets interesting. The current yellow jersey, Michael Rasmussen, is married to a Mexican woman, and therefore spends extended periods of the year in Mexico, training. He’s also a man who likes his privacy, so he’s been pretty lax about announcing his whereabouts whilst overseas.
Now, whether or not the Danish cycling union would, in any case, have bothered to send a man with a test tube to the other side of the world to tap Rasmussen’s pee is a pragmatic question that has no place in the world of cycling bureaucracy. Rasmussen wasn’t available for testing and that’s that.
This happened on several occasions and Rasmussen was issued several warnings. At that point, he should have been penalised, possibly with a one month racing ban or something similar. Instead, however, the Danish union did nothing. In fact, worse than that, they let him take part in the Danish national championship a month ago. In other words, they let the issue slide.
None of this would have mattererd one iota, if the coordinating body of the UCI hadn’t today got wind of this and demanded from the Tour management that Rasmussen be removed from the race for failing to have made himself available for out-of-competition testing.
Rasmussen admits that he hasn’t always treated the Danish union’s demands to be kept abreast of his movements seriously, because they are difficult to comply with. A form has to be filled out before the start of every quarter, detailing the rider’s movements over the next three months. Rasmussen failed to complete one such form on time, resulting in an official warning.
However, to demand his removal from the Tour de France after the cycling union, themselves, let Rasmussen race a month earlier is ludicrous. Not only did they let him race, but they performed doping checks on him numerous times when he was available for testing and found him to be completely clean.
The obvious questions are:
Why did they let Rasmussen race in the Danish national championship?
Why was he not penalised at the time according to the union’s own rules?
Why did the UCI not approach the management of the Tour de France before the race started?
Why did the UCI make their demand only today, now that Rasmussen is firmly established in the yellow jersey?
It stinks. Bureaucratic incompetence, political malice or some unholy concoction of the two?
Political malice, if you ask me. The UCI and the ASO (the organising body of the Tour de France) have been involved in a power struggle for some time now, with the UCI trying to enforce a closed circuit of races and cajole independent race organisers, such as the ASO, into allowing only UCI-approved ProTour teams into their events.
As usual, it’s not just political power at stake, but money, too. There are huge sponsorship contracts and television broadcasting rights in the pool, so the bald-headed and grey-haired vultures in suits are circling.
None of this has anything to do with cycling whatsoever. The riders, the teams, the fans and the sport as a whole are all victims of this posturing and greed, thinly veiled behind the pretense of seeking to cleanse the sport of drugs. In reality, everyone is looking after his own interests.
Business as usual.