Now that we’ve come to the end
I’ve been trying to piece it together,
Not that distance makes anything clearer.
~ Paul Muldoon

The story of the Tour de France began in Paris. Montmartre to be precise. That was where the offices of  L’Auto-Vélo were located and where Géo Lefèvre first punted the idea that became the Tour de France. In order to put some symmetry on this thing, let’s draw this series of articles on aspects of the revenue-sharing debate to its conclusion by returning to Paris. Issy-les-Moulineaux to be precise. That’s where Amaury Sport Organisation is headquartered, next door to the offices of L’Auto‘s spiritual successor, L’Équipe.

Most days, the story goes, you’ll find the matriarch of the Amaury family dining in L’Équipe‘s staff canteen. While it is her thirty-something son, Jean-Etienne, who heads up the sporting arm of the family empire, it is Marie-Odile Amaury who is the Amaury Group’s chief executive. The buck stops with her. And, as a hands-on chief executive, she undoubtedly seeks to stay aware of all the bucks heading her way. She keeps a watchful eye over the affairs of ASO.

What does Amaury see today when she looks at ASO? She sees a Dakar Rally that is going from strength to strength. She sees a Tour de France that is back on an even keel. She sees ASO’s cyclo-sportif footprint growing, with the creation of new events like the Etapa Argentina and the acquisition of events like the Roc d’Azur.

But Amaury must also be aware of the storm clouds gathering on the horizon. There are the ever-present clouds of those who call for a greater share of ASO’s wealth, more money, a bigger slice of the cake, more crumbs from the table. Nor can Amaury be unaware of the threats posed by would-be sporting-magnates like Arnaud Lagardère.

Even if Lagardère proves to be the sort who would pull a gun in a fistfight, I’d like to think that the Amaurys would still be able to take the media-to-munitions mogul. They’re not without a few dirty tricks up their own sleeves, as Laurent Fignon discovered after he snapped up Paris-Nice from under their noses. But that is a fight that is unlikely to come to a single stand-up knock-down session. The Amaurys and Lagardère are digging in for a long war, an attritional war, each chipping away at the other bit by bit.

What of the other notable rival, the UCI’s new race-organising arm, Global Cycling Promotion? Could ASO take them? Fighting the UCI is not easy. Not because they don’t play by Marquess of Queensberry rules (the Amaurys can pay scant attention to them too, when the need arises) but because, as cycling’s sole governing body, the UCI ultimately write the rules and referee the fight.

The Amaurys – to their cost – know that fighting the UCI is not easy. I’m not just referring here to the ProTour Wars. There’s older history than that. Back in the eighties, when Hein Verbruggen set in motion the changes which would turn the UCI from being a toothless tiger into a force to be reckoned with, the organisers of the Tour attempted to halt him in his tracks.

Starting out as a marketing executive with the candy confectioner Mars, Verbruggen rose to power within the UCI’s professional arm, the Fédération Internationale du Cyclisme Professionnel  (FICP), before – following the death of Luis Puig in 1990 – taking the helm of the UCI itself. While still with the FICP, Verbruggen took an idea from Vélo magazine and introduced the FICP World Rankings, which put a value on the head of every rider in the peloton, based on the points they accumulated over the course of a season.

Then Verbruggen expanded his power base with the introduction of the World Cup, supplanting the Super Pernod Prestige Trophy. FICP points became the key to gaining entry into the World Cup races. Félix Lévitan and the men of the Société du Tour de France saw Verbruggen’s initiative as being an attempt to stake a claim on sponsorship income, an attempt by the UCI to bring their own sponsors to others’ events. A move which would ultimately, they calculated, see the UCI muscle in on the TV revenues generated by the race organisers.

The Tour’s organisers became résistants, fighting the UCI with word and deed. In 1988, with the Société du Tour de France in turmoil as race directors fell like flies (three leaving in the space of just eighteen months) the Tour’s organisers even offered Verbruggen the gig that would neutralise the threat he posed to them: become Jean-Pierre Courcol’s replacement as director of the Tour de France. The men of the Tour know the truth of the old adage about keeping your friends close, your enemies closer still.

Hein Verbruggen, though, was not for turning and declined the offer from the Société du Tour de France. The World Cup ploughed ahead, eventually morphing into the ProTour before being rebranded as the WorldTour. For sure, the Tour’s organisers won some important skirmishes. The battlements around the Tour’s TV revenue withstood the brickbats the UCI tried to throw at them. And the World Cup was never successful at attracting its own sponsorship income.

A story for you: if you’ve ever worked in the media industry, there’s a trick you might be familiar with when faced with new rivals (or when threatening existing operators in the market): sponsors (advertisers) are advised or induced to stay away from the new kid on the block. The new kid is left to slowly wither away, expenses mounting up, reserves being run down, little or no income coming in. Eventually they fold and go away. Some people call this bullying. Others call it business. Whatever the name, it’s a trick that the Amaurys are not unfamiliar with, on both the media and sporting sides of their empire.

Whether this is why the World Cup singularly failed to attract sponsors, or whether the World Cup was just a pointless event that no one could see any merit in, well that’s a question that remains unanswered. But it was an attractive enough proposition when Pernod used to sponsor it. Back then, though, L’Équipe were supportive of the Super Pernod Prestige Trophy and gave it plenty of column inches.

All victories come at a cost. ASO were made to pay a price for their defiance. Showing his contempt for the sport’s traditional stakeholders, Verbruggen rode roughshod over them. One example: he added a time trial to the UCI-organised World Championships. In doing this he killed ASO’s end-of-season time trial, the Grand Prix des Nations. The UCI’s lesson was clear: don’t fuck with us.

Back to the present. The storm clouds on the horizon. What threat does Global Cycling Promotion pose to ASO, when all ASO’s races are within cycling’s traditional heartland? GCP is, after all, supposed to be charged with bringing bike racing to the rising economies of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). Where’s the beef in that?

The beef is that all of ASO’s races are not within cycling’s traditional heartland. ASO, for a long time, have been involved with developing cycling in Africa, through their Tour du Faso. That seems to have slipped quietly off the calendar this year. The why and the how I don’t know, perhaps someone reading this will tell me one day. But Africa is not the end of ASO’s international interests. ASO are partnered with AEG, the organisers of the Tour of California. They’re also helping to bring cycling to the Arab world, with the Tours of Oman and Qatar. And ASO partnered with Oman in their bid for the 2015 World Championships.

With ASO’s cyclosportif footprint expanding into Argentina on the back of the success of the Dakar Rally, can it be long before they set their sights on organising races in countries visited by the Dakar (Argentina, Chile and Peru)? Or look at Indonesia. Earlier this year ASO had advisors at the Tour of Singkarak (a 2.2 event, held in June). Advisors, fans of military history love to point out, frequently turn into boots on the ground.

So the UCI, through GCP, are not the only ones trying to expand cycling beyond its traditional borders. As ASO’s Christian Prudhomme pointed out a few months back, none of this is new for the Amaurys. “Riding a bike is universal,” Prudhomme explained during this year’s Tour, “but cycling competitively isn’t yet. We have to go everywhere […]. International development is important for ASO.” He then went on to highlight the history of the Tours of Oman and Qatar, before offering his audience another slice of history: “But this isn’t new to us. In 1954, four years before the foundation of the common European market, we organised the start of the Tour de France in Amsterdam, outside France. We went to Berlin in 1987 before the fall of the Wall, etc.”

The UCI can, at times, be thin-skinned and Prudhomme’s boasting might have been seen by some as a put-down of the UCI’s efforts to internationalise cycling. The UCI never took kindly to Dick Pound’s little barbs. And, in more recent months, they were stung by comments from USADA’s Travis Tygart having to do with foxes and hen houses. If the UCI and ASO were really entering into another petty little struggle for the soul of cycling, the UCI could easily have responded to Prudhomme’s braggadocio by reminding us of all the non-traditional nations they have sent the World Championships to down through the years. Or maybe they could have just pointed out that the reason the Tour went to Berlin had little to do with bringing cycling to the Communists and everything to do with capitalism: the good burghers of Berlin paid the Société du Tour a king’s ransom in order to entice them across the Iron Curtain.

But would the UCI waste their time fighting ASO with words when they can fight them with deeds? Time to recall a story told in the first part of this series. Back in 1946, when the post-Libération fight for title to France’s Grand Tour was going on, the UCI settled the first round by choosing Jacques Goddet’s Tour de France over its rival – Ce Soir‘s Ronde de France – for the calendar slot. Today, the UCI still have control over those calendar slots. Events can be shifted around the calendar to rival existing events. Or new events can meet considerable resistance in their attempts to gain a calendar slot. And, of course, old events can always lose their place on the calendar. While we would all notice were the UCI to attempt to remove the Tour de France from the calendar, how many of you had heard of the Tour of Singkarak before ASO sent advisors there?

So let’s ask the question again: what threat does Global Cycling Promotion pose to ASO? Some drippy hippy shit here: if a smile is just a frown turned upside down, then a threat is just an opportunity in disguise. Rather than asking whether GCP represent a threat to ASO, we should wonder instead whether GCP are really an opportunity. ASO and the UCI have, after all, kissed and made up since the ProTour Wars. And ASO have partnered with the UCI to bring cycling to the Chinese. Those aforementioned words from Prudhomme, they were made at the media launch of the Tour of Beijing.

But aren’t ASO still fighting with the UCI? Despite Marie-Odile Amaury’s edict that L’Équipe should give over banging on about doping and report news rather than make it, wasn’t it L’Équipe who broke the story about the UCI’s Index of Suspicion? Had the UCI done something to upset the Amaurys, causing them to respond in such an unkind fashion?

That Index of Suspicion story, how did it really hurt the UCI? Why, it hurt them by showing that they suspected certain riders of doping more than they suspected others! That really is utter balls. The Index of Suspicion was exactly what many in the anti-doping community have long called for: greater use of intelligence-based target testing, as opposed to inefficient blanket testing. Wasn’t this exactly how the AFLD and the FFC caused such a stir at the 2008 Tour, by profiling riders in advance of the race and then using those profiles to draw up a list – an index – of who the testers needed to pay the most attention to? Look at how successful that was.

The people who were hurt by the Index of Suspicion were the riders. Their teams felt the pain too. Because the cycling community saw the Index of Suspicion as being an Index of Guilt, rather that what it really was, an index of priority for the testers, partly based on something as simple as when a rider was last tested. Whoever gave that list the title of the Index of Suspicion was a clever little operator.

When did the Index story break? May time, wasn’t it? Not long after the AIGCP’s deadline for “drastic action” should the UCI fail to rescind the ban on race radios. That drastic action, we all knew even before the May Day deadline, was a boycott of the Tour of Beijing. A race organised by the UCI in collaboration with (among others) ASO.

Step back in time to just a few weeks before L’Équipe revealed the leaked Index. Recall that little strop some managers pulled, walking out of a meeting with the UCI. Some of the managers claimed that their walkout was spurred by the UCI trying to give them a history of the bicycle, which is always a contentious issue, with the French and the British going at one another, each claiming they got there first. Only for the Germans to get chippy at their contribution being overlooked. And all the while the Italians just sit there looking smug, knowing that they hold the trump card, some doodles in one of Leonardo’s notebooks. It’s usually around that time that the fists start flying. There are days when I actually admire Pat McQuaid.

The day after that meeting, L’Équipe carried a report of its proceedings, a report which claimed McQuaid had informed the managers that, thanks to the bio-passport, he held precise information on each team’s riders, before brandishing “the spectre of public revelations that would cause damage.” One AIGCP member, Roberto Amadio (Liquigas), disputed L’Équipe‘s version of events but in doing so seemed to confirm that McQuaid had in fact threatened them with the public revelation of a list of targeted riders.

And then, by one of those strange coincidences life throws up all the time, such a list of targeted riders happened to find its way into the hands of someone at L’Équipe. Someone who, despite Amaury’s edict to the contrary, banged the doping drum and made the news instead of just sitting back and reporting what others had uncovered. Did a head roll in L’Équipe that day? There’s more than enough blood on Amaury’s carpet to suggest that, had the Index of Suspicion story offended her, the journalists and editors responsible would have faced the guillotine.

Am I just peddling a conspiracy theory here, demonstrating that I read far too many thrashy thrillers? Of course I am. For the UCI were hurt by L’Équipe‘s release of the Index of Suspicion. They were cut to the quick. They were shocked – shocked I tell you – that someone could leak such a list, quite possibly someone in their own organisation. And so McQuaid promised to do a George Smiley and root out the traitor in the UCI’s ranks. Except, of course, that I see McQuaid as less like George Smiley and more like George Stroud, from Kenneth Fearing’s The Big Clock.

And so when I picture Marie-Odile Amaury sitting in her Issy-les-Moulineaux office, gazing out at the Paris skyline and the storm clouds gathering on ASO’s horizon, I don’t see her frowning when she views the cloud caused by GCP. I see her smiling. Happy in the knowledge that ending the ProTour Wars was – for ASO – the right thing to do, for in so doing she finally enabled ASO and the UCI to unite in a common purpose: sharing the revenue to be generated by the global expansion of cycling.

Marie Odile Amaury, PDG du groupe Amaury (Crédits photo: HAMILTON/REA)

And I see her smiling, happy in the knowledge that Hein Verbruggen has left the stage and gone off to play World Mind Games with his new toy, SportAccord. But look closely at that smile. Is that a frown forming at its edges? SportAccord is, after all, just a new stage from which Verbruggen is waging his war to allow sports’ international federations to seize control of the TV revenues generated by their sports. The battlements around the Tour’s TV revenues are already being reinforced in preparation for Verbruggen’s next assault.

This is my throne. This is my sport.

The efforts that I have personally made in order to give the fans of the sport the illusion that the peloton is clean came to a beautiful climax on Thursday, where the ingredients to our recipe coagulated on the highest conclusion of any Tour stage on the legendary slopes of Galibier.

The face French housewives dream to see

Voeckler, the reluctant champion, choice of housewives all over France, gasping for air at the finish, channeling the spirit of Jean Francois Bernard on Ventoux, or Stephen Roche at the conclusion of any stage was the image of the day. The sight of Cadel Evans at the base of the climb throwing down the gauntlet to the pretenders to the Tour throne only needed a Pantani bandana to be tossed off his melon as he accelerated out of the saddle. There was Andy, who silently prayed for the finish line with 200 metres to go, while Frank took advantage of a tired Evans, and showed a clever hand by SmartOPard™ (thank you @Vaughters).

Yes, we saw glimmers of these performances in the last two editions of the Giro, but none featured the face of Contador saying “No mas.”

We in Aigle are in our glory. The scourge of the cheats has given way to glorious pain and suffering. Finally. Our plans, in conjunction with the ASO, have given us the sporting spectacle we have wished for since Verbruggen and Armstrong went out to pasture, thank Jaysus Christ.

This has been all due to the fact that the ASO does an amazing job of administering terristrial video rights for the Tour. They manage them better than most entities on the planet, hence the sporting event is viewed by more people around the world than any other. Yes, we tried to get our hand in that cookie jar a couple of years back, which almost precipitated a cycling civil war of decimating proportions. Alright, alright, I went about empire building the wrong way.

"Not happy with Vaughters Comments" Cold Blue Steel Look.

Rule #1 about dealing with the ASO –DON’T TRY TO FOOK WITH THEIR TV EMPIRE.  They will bitch slap any takers harder than China has spanked Obama economically.

It took me relocating Verbruggen from the management committee to his SportAccord ivory tower to atone for that rookie blunder of mine. Thankfully, after I truly realized how much reach these Frenchy Frenchies have in the world of cycling, I thought it best to make the peace and build events for them to run. Worked like clockwork so far.

However, while on this subject, lo and behold, what do I read Tuesday via our friends at www.cyclingnews.com? Vaughters on Revenue Sharing. And to quote our illustrious and well-read friend, who spoke with Cyclingnews.com:

Cycling is one of a few professional sports where the athletes aren’t part of the revenue sharing of television rights. The business model for teams has got to change in order for the sport to change and become successful in the long term and that means the teams becoming partners with the race organiser and not necessarily just their minions.

There is a certain responsibility required when you are in a position of authority that states unless you are drunk on Guinness or Whiskey, throwing around glib socialistic-style quotes (even though you are in France and really feeling that Voltairian leftist influence) isn’t necessarily the best career choice by a team owner.

Does that article make the sponsors backing the WorldTour Teams warm and fuzzy? No! It says to me as a big shot, “Hey thanks for giving me millions of euros and believing my pitch on the long-term viability of my venture to bring a public relations windfall to your firm, but hey, unless I get a 10 million euro cash ejection Hail Mary from the Lords of the Tour, you just wasted your fooking money.”

The Good Old Days.

You see, while you would THINK that those quotes would be soothing to your sponsors, it’s not. It just makes them think that you’re a crack whore with a methadone addiction who’s looking for another hit, and blames the system for the addiction while failing to take responsibility for the fact that you caused yourself to be a crack whore.

Still not seeing it? Pretend that you go to the bank saying that you need a loan to buy a house. In the process of acquiring that loan, the bank asks your income, and then asks you to estimate the utilities for the home. In an effort to confirm your loan, you fudge a little on the income part, and you outright lowball the utilities. Then once you’re in the home, your salary goes down and the utilities go up. So you go to the bank looking for help to pay the utilities, and they (the bank) look at you like your a fooking two-headed alien love child, and you can’t understand why.

Everyone has tried to compare models in the sporting world to cycling, but my beloved sport defies that comparison, as major team sports and their models have evolved in a very different manner from professional cycling. What everyone forgets is that the nature of the sport is very nomadic and unstable. It has been this way since the beginning of time in cycling.

In fact, riders ARE the minions of the ASO, and have been since 1905. They are interchangeable, the are replaceable. The beauty of cycling is no one really cares how fast these blokes finish the stage, they are more interested in the battles and the spectacles that occur between the stage start and finish. Anyone actually care how fast it takes them to a finish a stage? I certainly don’t give two shites. Or three. So, we could throw some amateur French lads in there to duke it out, and many will just not give a flying crap that Contador isn’t there (well they’d probably be pretty fooking happy at this point).

The Good Old Minion Days

The prime example of this is the French housewife hysteria around Thomas Voeckler. Best. Thing. For. The. Tour. In. A. Very. Long. Time.  You see, the Professional Cycling business probably most closely models that of the entertainment industry. Think of the professional cyclists as the ensemble cast of a television program. Think of the producer of the show as the equivalent of a team owner, and the network purchasing the show as the ASO. Producers can browbeat the talent to conform to the wishes of the network, the network can offer up concessions or pay raises to those working in the cast, but unless the talent collectively rises up to say “fook off” to the network, it ain’t happening, no matter how hard the producer may try.

I like to use US television programmes as this benchmark, because they’re all fooking crazy. Like Charlie Sheen. Good Example of a “talent” failing to understand the reality of his situation, and finding himself outside the “team” and also outside the “network.”

Or an example of a positive effort to force revenue sharing upon a network was the collective work of the ensemble cast of Friends. They determined their entire careers, agreeing to be paid the same throughout the years, standing by Matthew Perry and his drug issues, and ultimately deciding when they were done, in spite of the network’s pleas for one more year. This means that I’m coming back to the same conclusion I always do: the “producer” (i.e., Vaughters) can whinge as much as he likes about what the “network” (ASO) is doing, but until the “talent” (pro peloton) gets off their arses and collectively barks, we will have the status quo.

So what am I trying to say? The ASO taint going to fooking share their money unless they are given a very fooking good reason to do so. Don’t look at me to fight that battle, because it got me absolutely nowhere.

@theJensie modeling the big fussy fuss – the little radio.

Speaking of the ASO and the UCI, did you like how we outmaneuvered the AIGCP on the race radio walk-out/protest/pout for the Tour of Beijing? Do you like how I brought in Verbruggen to stall off Vaughters long enough so I could finish my negotiations with the ASO and hand them the Tour of Beijing on a silver platter? Sorry JV, best of luck trying to line up the ASO on anything, and you should always know that I have an endgame and a long-game that is being played, and our two organizations are pretty much thick as thieves now.

Speaking of thick as thieves, anyone cast any money on a Basso/Evans alliance for Alpe d’Huez? Anyone? Evans still has several cards to play, so be careful jumping on that Schleck bandwagon, lest you forget what happened to Laurent Fignon in Paris back in ’89. Vive Le Tour.