Happy V-E Day!

Has anyone noticed that the war is over?!?!

It's coming out in dribs and drabs: the traditional governing body, the UCI, has apparently -- a word I can't stress enough -- reached an accord with the Amaury Sports Organization on the structure of Cycling's top races. Details were reported earlier here by Nickel17 on the new World Calendar, which will add the Grand Tours and other affiliated races back into the Pro Tour. But it's not just a race series; starting in 2011, the Grand Tours will accept either 17 or 18 teams that the UCI ships over.

The latter point was ostensibly the hard part: determining which and how many teams get Tour or Giro or Vuelta invites was a huge bone of contention all along. Reality, however, had settled this issue in the race organizers' favor already. Of the 20 Pro Tour teams, Discovery/Postal and Phonak no longer exist; Unibet and Barloworld came and went without ever being fully accepted; and Gerolsteiner and Credit Agricole are on the chopping block. Undoubtedly the UCI could keep promoting existing continental teams or adopting new ones (Garmin? the Russians?), but the original Gang of Twenty is long gone. And the UCI long since lost the ability to cloak new teams with the same top-club legitimacy.

So that's settled. Remaining issues include who handles doping controls, and therefore what working structure and financial arrangements will be required. Given the contentious nature of the parties, that's more than enough to rekindle world war III. But if the UCI, ASO, RCS (Giro) and Unipublic (Vuelta) are as sick of the horrible infighting as the riders and fans are, then the potential for reconciliation may be real.

I'm very tempted to lash out at all parties for taking so long: I mean, how hard would it have been for the UCI to admit a year ago that they couldn't send 20 teams to the Grand Tours? Everyone knew it by then. But that's a single issue, and the real roadblocks surely ran deeper than the naked eye could see. Perhaps a better way to view the problem is through the doping arguments: ASO simply didn't trust the UCI to competently run the controls, on which the race's legitimacy hinged. Maybe it was necessary for them to smack around McQuaid and the UCI for two years to force changes in the latter. Maybe it was about the UCI coming to terms (with or without ASO's shrieking) with the ground-shift in the sport, from endless scandal toward... something else. The right people, in the right structure could surely have come up with a strategic plan sooner, but in the bifurcated power structure of top-level cycling, two groups weren't going to have an easy time getting together, in trust and cooperation, to handle such complex and sensitive issues.

Anyway, I'm bloviating now. What's more remarkable is the fact that the end of the war, of two years of constant, high-volume recriminations, could melt away so subtly that VeloNews still hasn't written about it. Maybe the problem is stunned disbelief.