Polemica Roundup

this morning on CN. good grief, as if riding isn’t hard enough! i certainly hope Paris-Nice is not going to be short five teams – what nonsense.

damn…tv interview with valverde right now……no idea what he is saying. he did say ‘very good’, so perhaps he is innocent!!

…to make a lot of noise in a press conference. Why wasn’t the payment issue dealt quietly in the background instead of a threat issued in a press release? A major international sport should not be organised in this way.

Good riddance to Schumacher. He may be punished for the same offence as Kohl but his continued denials only make him look desperate. Smell the coffee Stefan…

preferably Flanders… but I’ll take half a cup of Roubaix if you have some laying around.

…today was the deadline to pay. Announcing who has not paid in public is not the best thing to do. Cofidis wired the bank transfer this morning, just as you’d expect from a finance company. They were not advised that if they didn’t pay early they’d get named and shamed in a press conference. Once again McQuaid opens his mouth a bit too fast for me.

how you would have reacted UCI announced the day after the deadline that these teams couldn’t participate.

BTW, I thought Cofidis was a cycling team and not finance company like its sponsor(and Saxo Bank).

Anyway, do any of us know the actual deadline? I thought these things were taken care of along with the other payments/licences before the beginning of the season. Is it an extended deadline we are dealing with?
I’ve never really looked into the financing behind this sport.

"Cofidis, obviously, has never had the intention not to pay…

Wait. Let me start over. We so do not say it that way in English. Okee, here we go.

“Obviously, Cofidis has always inteneded to pay.” The teams regrets that the UCI “imposed without negotiation a plan of paying 60,000 euro now and 60,000 euro in June. The method is deplorable, but I am going to pay.”

Last year, the teams were allowed to pay the amount required on a monthly basis. As you can well imagine, this was far easier.

I thought today was just the deadline for Valverde to submit his brief.

“I don’t like this kind of blackmail from the UCI and Pat McQuaid. I don’t accept blackmail from anyone, McQuaid, ASO, not even Osama bin Laden!”

“The UCI’s tone is completely wrong in these circumstances. We’ve already paid 30,000 euros and proposed that we pay outstanding amount in installments. The next one being on April 1st and then another in July. What business pays for something in advance like this?”

“I have no problems with taking this to the courts to seek damages if we’re not allowed to race tomorrow. The UCI can’t turn around two days before the race and blackmail us like this, not with all the delays and problems they’ve had with the biological passport in the past. We’ll be turning up for the race tomorrow, you can count on that.”

Link

on paris-nice testing between the uci and the afld too. i think i’m too lazy to read about the detail. just that, well, they’re playing nice.

sunshine and puppy dogs!

Follow the CN link and JV is saying the right things:

“I am also 100% sure their financial situations with the UCI will be resolved by the start of Paris-Nice.”

Vaughters agreed that the teams need to be given leeway to make their contributions for the passport program as they can afford to. “In these difficult times, financial flexibility is something everyone in cycling will need to have. Hopefully, in the future, the AIGCP and the UCI will be able to negotiate payments plans acceptable for everyone far in advance of deadlines so these situations don’t become a controversial matter.”

Well said JV. This sort of stuff should be fixed behind the scenes, no?

This image was just released to the press:

in fact Lefevere was so pissed that he just said fuck it and paid the remaining 90,000 Euro’s needed for the full 120,000 payment(Quickstep already paid 30,000 earlier) although he only needed to pay 30,000 today.