Who speaks for the riders?

[Thank you to the three emailers who generously assisted with this post.]

Amidst the hue and cry of the doping wars, the financial meltdowns of vanishing sponsors, and the imbecilic power struggles between the ASO and UCI, the riders themselves often seem ignored and forgotten by those that rule today's troubled cycling world. The UCI thinks nothing of making unilateral important decisions without even consulting the riders. The ASO have eyes only for their profit margin and their sacred race's good image in the world's view. To them, riders are seemingly only of incidental importance as actors on the stage they set. The CPA is supposed to represent the riders, but seems passive, powerless, and riven by the tendency toward disunity among the ranks of the disparate athletes. Rider representatives to the CPA often find themselves the focus of petty criticisms by other riders who will seemingly find some way to disagree with any position they take. The CPA representatives are also usually among the well-known and highly paid veterans of the sport, whose real interest in truly advocating for the rights and concerns of the average low-paid domestique may be limited. While all these organizations may have started off with good intentions, the results are far less than ideal and often leave the riders unheard and disrespected.

Part of the problem is that there are always more riders than spots available on good teams, always plenty more cyclists to fill the shoes of those exploited, used up, or fallen out of favor, always another domestique to replace one who spoke honestly about the wrong thing. Thus the powers that be shrug dismissively at the apparently preposterous idea that the rights of riders should be given respect, and that the riders' views and opinions should be given a prominent voice in the sport's governance. Without the power of unity and lacking a true labor union, the riders are often left at the whim of condescending officials who haphazardly dictate to them as if they are children.

The rules of the sport related to riders' rights such as the minimum required salaries, insurance coverage, bank guarantees, and standards for contracts are specified by the UCI, CPA, and AIGCP in the document called the "Joint Agreements" and in the UCI rules labeled Part II: Road Races. These documents include requirements for all riders at ProTour and pro-continental teams to be paid no less than the set minimum salaries. (As of 2006, ProTour: € 30,000 or € 24,000 for a neo-pro. Pro-continental: € 25,000 or € 21,500 for a neo-pro.) While these documents set out the rules that all parties are supposedly required to follow, the fact is that many of these rules are often ignored and unenforced by the UCI. The culture of lawlessness that pervades much of the cycling world starts at the very top. When the UCI fails to enforce their own rules time after time, is it any surprise that many team managers and riders also think little of breaking the rules in myriad other ways? When the UCI has two sets of rules, the official ones on paper which they ignore, and the unwritten ones which they enforce when it suits them, then double standards and lack of ethical consistency or rigor becomes the expected norm among the entire cycling milieu. Few people think much of breaking the rules because so many people, from the corrupt highest UCI officials down to the lowliest doping rider, are doing it in one way or another. With a shrug, it is simply dismissed as "the way it is." Yet why does it have to be this way? Why do we accept this sad state of affairs in the sport we love?

These days the UCI has seemingly decided to actually really enforce anti-doping rules which went quietly overlooked for years during Verbruggen's disastrous reign as incompetent petty dictator. Is it any wonder that plenty of riders are ignoring the UCI's new demand to stop doping, when for years the UCI said the same exact thing but obviously didn't really mean it? Why should a rider bother following the rules when the UCI itself obviously doesn't bother following them?

For argument's sake, let's say that a rider wants to see a particular rule enforced and turns to the UCI for help. The UCI, as we all well know, is not exactly an organization known for impartiality. Rather, they tend toward a nastily vindictive attitude toward any rider who dares to speak against it, even if that rider is only honestly pointing out a clear and flagrant failure of the UCI to enforce their own rules. The UCI is one of those unfortunate bureaucracies that cannot bear to face its own failings, especially when they are aired in public view, so when faced with totally valid criticism or complaint, it tends to attack the messenger rather than show the maturity to address the real issue. Perhaps this is why riders who are mistreated by their teams, left without insurance, unpaid the required minimum salary, or otherwise treated in ways against the rules, are often slow to seek any official redress for their mistreatment. There is hardly anyone for them to turn to who is strictly on their side and possesses the power to get the rules enforced. The CPA can lobby for a rider's interests, but rarely has a way to really force a decision, and in many cases seems not to care. In most cases, only the UCI has the final say, but they are a politicized and biased group with their own agendas and interests.

In the case of a rider vs team conflict, the UCI is hardly a neutral party to resolve the dispute fairly. Rather, as an entity that promotes cycling and licenses teams, the UCI has a distinct conflict of interest in any such situation. The UCI wants to protect the team's reputation and prevent a situation where the team will lose its license due to broken rules, financial irregularities, or the loss of the team's bank guarantee. In a sport where disappearing sponsors are rife, the UCI wants to keep and protect any teams that it has, and so is rather likely to want to look the other way when a team is breaking the rules. The UCI may give them a slap on the wrist, a private warning to behave, but they want at all costs to avoid having to pull a team's license, so they are prone to leniency even in cases where the team's management may have been grossly violating UCI rules. Consider also that as the UCI puts more and more of their budget and manpower towards the endless fight against doping, they have less and less money and personnel to devote to enforcing the rules regarding the rights of riders, such as checking that team's budgets are carefully audited, that proper health coverage is provided, or that assistance is given to riders who make legitimate financial claims against their team.

Pity any rider who thinks that the UCI will do their job of enforcing the rules in a straightforward manner. Let's say that a rider who signed a contract to ride for the minimum required salary for a pro-continental team is denied the proper compensation he is entitled to in one way or another. According to the Joint Agreements the rider has the right to file a claim on the team's bank guarantee and be paid the correct amount to make up for their missing salary according to their contract. However, the UCI is notoriously slow and stingy about actually releasing any money from team's bank guarantees.

For example, Floyd Landis had to wait years to get his money when Mercury went under, and was angrily punished by the UCI when he dared to reply honestly to a reporter who asked him about the situation. Landis broke the cardinal rule by making the UCI look bad in public. So as usual, instead of following the rules and just paying Landis the money he was clearly owed in a timely manner, they instead got angry at him for daring to suggest that they ought to enforce their own rules. Such is the unfortunate possible fate of most any rider who rightfully asks the UCI to do their job of enforcing the rules. Of course, the UCI went on blithely claiming that they had no proof Landis was not paid.

In cycling, it is all too common for teams to fall into financial problems. Sponsors disappear midseason, managers "misdirect" funds meant to pay riders, mechanics end up selling team bikes to support themselves, and on and on. Clearly there is a very good reason that the UCI requires bank guarantees and budget information from any team it licenses. But if the UCI is riven by the conflict of interest between the need to preserve a team's license versus the right of the rider to be treated according to the rules, then the whole situation is stacked totally against the rider. Riders also want to avoid being labeled as "difficult" or as troublemakers, even if all they are doing is simply asking for what they are due according to the rules. When riders are understandably afraid to speak up, it makes it all the easier for the UCI to ignore the riders' mistreatment and ignore the rules which they are supposed to enforce.

The non-payment of the UCI-required minimum salaries to riders is common among many teams. One source told me that he thinks every pro-continental team has at least some riders being underpaid in this way. One method teams employ is to create two separate contracts for a rider. One contract is the official one sent to the UCI which lists the normal minimum salary as the amount the rider will be paid. The second contract is the real albeit secret one, which specifies the lower salary amount that the rider will actually get. In some cases, the rider is paid the official UCI-contract amount, but then is quietly required to pay back part of this to the team according to the second real contract amount. In other cases the team pays the salary but then requires the rider to buy his own bike and/or other expensive equipment for the season, and then the team takes the bike to sell at the end of the season, leaving the rider with a pitifully small net gain. Other scenarios are teams that make the riders pay for all kinds of expenses themselves that are supposed to be paid by the team, so that in the end the rider is making far less than the required minimum salary.

There are also rumors that some riders even on ProTour teams are riding for free, without any salary at all. They hope to earn some prize money, but more importantly to get the chance to prove themselves in order to eventually get a better contract. If riders are themselves agreeing willingly to such technically disallowed salary arrangements, then some people would say, what is the harm? The harm is that the Joint Agreements exist in order to require teams to provide some basic rights and protection to the riders, and when these rules are ignored by everyone, then the riders have no clear recourse to obtain fair treatment when they really need or want it. When teams and riders ignore these rules, it also makes the working conditions worse for all riders by lowering the bar of exactly what degree of abusive working conditions are tolerated and allowed in the sport as a whole. If the UCI meant all along never to enforce these rules, then why did they allow them to be created to begin with? When the working conditions of the riders are seemingly based on a fake set of requirements that few bother following, then the legitimacy and moral standing of the whole sport is thrown into question. Nothing is as it seems, or as it ought to be.

Even if the riders cannot count overly much on the UCI or CPA to help them, perhaps they could seek help in the cycling media by publicizing their concerns. Surely a cycling journalist might take pity on them and bring their problem or particular injustice out into the public eye. Or maybe not. Most cycling magazines and websites rely on advertising revenue. Among their prominent advertisers are many companies that are partial sponsors of teams and individual athletes. These advertisers hardly want these cycling media sources to reveal any seriously damaging dirt on what mismanagement or other bad things may be going on behind the scenes with their sponsored teams or athletes. Cycling journalists likely know a hell of a lot more than they are ever going to tell us, the average cycling fan, even if in theory we ought to have the right to know in order to make informed decisions about what teams we will support.

Consider also that one single company, Future Publishing, currently owns and controls the content of Procycling, Cycling Plus, Cyclingnews.com, and BikeRadar.com. Just between Cyclingnews.com and Procycling, you have two sources that can form the sum total of what some cycling fans read. So let's say that Cyclingnews.com or Procycling make a decision to kill a certain story, due either to the fact that it would anger a big advertiser or due to the equally problematic issue that it could make the reporter of the story too unpopular with riders or managers that he or she needs as sources. You, the reader, are maybe never going to hear about this story, unless perhaps it is picked up by an independent news source or one of the newspaper reporters who seem to have far more independence. (It is no coincidence that David Walsh works for a large newspaper, not a cycling magazine.) Most specialized cycling journalists live a constant impossible balancing act of trying to stay on the good side of all the riders and teams, yet still trying to report honestly and thoroughly. Despite any given journalist's best intentions, this naturally leads to far less investigative reports on the tough issues than the sport desperately needs.

So let's say in theory that there is currently a European pro-continental team who has been breaking UCI rules by not paying a number of their riders the minimum salary. At least some portion of these riders have not agreed to such working conditions and have gone to the UCI seeking back payment out of their team's bank guarantee. Let's say there are cycling news sources who know about this yet do not report it. Would you, as the fans whose support underlies the very existence of the sport, find it tolerable that such abusive treatment of riders is allowed to occur and allowed to go unmentioned by the media sources who you rely on to inform you? Would it make you angry to know that there are more than a few riders employed on abusive terms in flagrant contravention of non-negotiable UCI contract terms and nothing lasting is done to prevent it happening again even when the riders have protested? How would you feel if you found out that these things are regularly going on yet you rarely if ever read about it?

The integrity of the media is only as good as the ethical codes they adhere to. If they refuse to report a newsworthy story, what does that say about their most basic integrity? Consider also that some media sources such as Cyclingnews.com are partial sponsors of teams themselves. Have you ever wondered what has gone on behind the scenes at the British team DFL-Cyclingnews-Litespeed that Cyclingnews very conveniently never bothered to report on? For another example, don't forget that at one point Eurosport was a co-sponsor of Kelme, a team who employed Dr. Fuentes. Do you think that we can rely on Eurosport to report reliably on Fuentes, when they were paying a part of his wages of sin?

So the next time you sit down to read the news of the cycling world, spare a thought for what is missing, the orphaned stories that never see the light of day, the exploited riders whose serious plights are never known about or properly remedied. Cycling fans, as the consumers of the cycling media, and as the ones whose patronage gives television coverage of races the value it holds, can take an active role by being critical and educated in the behavior we will accept from teams, from the UCI, and from the cycling media. To be passive and silent is to provide tacit acceptance and support to a frequently corrupt system that currently all-too-often allows the gross mistreatment of riders, without proper consequences and punishment for those responsible. The riders are the very life and heart of the sport, and deserve fair and prompt enforcement of the rules that exist to provide them minimal protection from abusive working conditions. If cycling officials, team managers, and even to some extent the cycling media will not always stand up for the rights of riders, perhaps we as fans have an honor-bound obligation to do so. Who else will?


The unenforced minimum salary rule