UCI President David Lappartient has said while there is not currently agreement between cycling’s stakeholders on how to make One Cycling a reality, there is apparently a consensus that it has to happen.
Richard Plugge, the Visma-Lease a Bike boss and the main instigator of the One Cycling project, told Escape Collective earlier this week Lappartient was on board with bringing the idea to fruition, maybe even as soon as March when the Frenchman will be one of the main contenders for the presidency of the International Olympic Committee, which would see him leave his UCI role.
“There are ongoing discussions with various stakeholders, not the full agreement, of course, but for us, there are some red lines,” Lappartient told the media including Escape at the start of the Women’s Tour Down Under stage 1 in Brighton, where he appeared alongside the South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas and retired cyclist Mark Cavendish.
“We don’t want to have a breakaway league, we don’t want to have a private league, and we want to make sure that we will respect also the races like the Tour Down Under like all the races that are here for years. We know that the economic model of the cycling can be improved. We know that the the power of cycling can be bigger than this. But we want to show the discussions to be under the umbrella of the UCI.”
The project, which is rumoured to be backed by ā¬300 million from Saudi Arabia, would need the support of not only the UCI governing body, but also teams, riders, and race organisers, predominantly the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), who run the Tours de France as well as many other events on the calendar including Paris-Roubaix and Paris-Nice.
“So I met various stakeholders,” Lappartient continued. “They are not [in] full agreement, as you may know on this, but we also agreed at the WorldTour seminar, the last WorldTour seminar, that we have to sit all together and to find the best the best way to do this. What we don’t want is to have races to pay three or four times more. So that’s that’s key for us; that discussions must be with teams, riders, organizers, under the umbrella of the UCI. But we are not, at the date of today, at the point of an agreement.”
If there is to be an official announcement prior to Lappatient’s hopeful election to the IOC presidency, he has around two months to help bridge the various interests and concerns to potentially change the sport of cycling as we know it.
Matt de Neef contributed reporting to this story.
Did we do a good job with this story?