After the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France gave Astana an un-vitation to their races, thereby igniting an international spitting match, the Vuelta a Espana was the only one of the cycling’s grand tours to welcome Astana.

Yes, the lowly Vuelta, which ranks third in grand tour hierarchy, broke ranks with the other two and extended an olive branch to Astana, perhaps to the detriment of Vuelta organizer Unipublic in the eyes of some.

Maybe the timing is merely coincidence, but just last week the president of Amaury Sports Organization, which owns the Tour de France, said ASO is looking into the “hypothetical possibility of a minority participation, of between one to 49 percent” in Unipublic and hence the Vuelta, according to Agence France Presse.

This is a worrisome possibility for Pat McQuaid, the president of Union Cycliste Internationale who chatted with 10 Speed for an hour in a phone interview Tuesday.

“I would … we would worry all right, yeah,” McQuaid said. “ASO would get in there and what they would do is blackmail the teams to ride the Vuelta. They would say, ‘If you want to ride the Tour de France, you gotta ride the Vuelta.’ Just the same as they did this year to the teams saying, ‘If you want to ride the Tour de France, you must ride Paris-Nice.’

“They’ll start using all of this sort of leverage against the teams, forcing the teams into the other races. It’s not sporting. It’s not done for sporting reasons.”

The relationship between UCI and ASO hasn’t been “sporting” for some time. UCI is the sport’s governing body. ASO is the sport’s top promoter and owner of the sport’s top race, the Tour de France, along with Paris-Nice, Paris-Roubaix and others.

Their simmering feud came to a head at the start of this season, with ASO’s decision to ban Astana from its races because of past doping issues. This led to a very public spat regarding Paris-Nice, one of the classic events promoted by ASO.

After the exclusion of Astana, the UCI asked the rest of its Pro Tour teams not to ride in Paris-Nice and threatened teams and riders with sanctions if they participated. Further, the race was sanctioned by the French Cycling Federation outside the auspices of the UCI.

The UCI has decided to pursue legal action against the French federation and its president for violating UCI rules in sanctioning Paris-Nice. (On a side note, the French fed has since found religion and declared that ASO’s Paris-Roubaix must be sanctioned by UCI.) No riders have been sanctioned as of yet.

“Nothing has become of that, no,” McQuaid said. “We’ll wait and see in the coming days and weeks what happens before we decide about sanctions on the part of the riders.”

Teams and riders almost were under an obligation to ride Paris-Nice because of their sponsors, who foot the bill completely for team’s budgets. McQuaid said he understands that, but he expressed disappointment that neither the teams nor the riders did anything in the form of demonstration or protest against the ASO and in support of UCI.

“But they didn’t do that,” McQuaid said. “They did have a choice.”

ASO’s choice was to ban Astana and stick with it, despite the UCI’s protestations and the public outcry that defending TdF winner Alberto Contador, now with Astana, won’t be able to defend his title and that Levi Leipheimer, also now with Astana, won’t be able to build on his third-place finish of last year. 

ASO’s decision was made ostensibly because of Astana’s history of doping violations. Last year the team was one of two teams booted from the Tour de France because riders were busted for doping. Two years ago, the team (then transitioning from Liberty Seguras sponsorship to Khasakstan’s Astana) didn’t have enough riders to field a team for the TdF because many were implicated in the Operacion Puerto doping scandal.

However, the team cleaned house in the offseason, hiring former U.S. Postal/Discovery Channel director sportif Johan Bruyneel, the guru behind an incredible run of Tour de France success with eight titles in the past nine years – seven in a row by Lance Armstrong and last year’s win by Contador. After Discovery folded for lack of new sponsorship, Bruyneel brought Contador, Leipheimer and the Discovery staff with him to Astana. He also instituted a state-of-the-art anti-doping program, similar to that of up-and-coming U.S. team Slipstream-Chipotle, revamped High Road (formerly T-Mobile) and CSC.

Nevertheless,  ASO barred Astana.

“The whole Astana thing is a great pity,” McQuaid said. “I’ve publicly stated here that I support Contador and I support the Astana team. People have said to me, ‘Well, why do you support the Astana team? Look at what they have done … You’re taking a big risk supporting them, etc.’ I said my reason for supporting them is that I think it’s a non-justifiable decision.

“If ASO had been consistent, they would have said to five teams, ‘We don’t want you in the Tour de France this year.’”

Astana, Cofidis, T-Mobile, Saunier Duval and Rabobank all had doping issues at last year’s Tour. Astana and Cofidis were booted. A T-Mobile rider was booted, a Saunier Duval rider’s late-Tour sample came up positive immediately after the Tour, and Rabobank fired Michael Rasmussen, the race leader in the coveted yellow jersey at the time, for allegedly lying about his whereabouts in missing doping control tests the month before the Tour. All tarnished ASO’s crown jewel.

“Why did they select Astana?” McQuaid said, before answering his own question. “It’s probably a political decision against UCI Pro Tour, UCI and against Johan Bruyneel, but it’s not a sporting decision.

“That’s why I defended the position of Astana and Contador, because the UCI is there to defend the sporting interest of the sport and teams and so forth, and I think the ASO were wrong to single out Astana and not allow the winner of last year’s Tour de France and the third place to defend their position. It’s completely wrong. It’s scandalous and it’s wrong.”

As to why ASO would make a decision to target Bruyneel, McQuaid speculated it was because of Bruyneel’s and Armstrong’s “calculated” approach to winning the Tour and perhaps what some perceive as their arrogance. “I think that just pissed off the French, excuse my language,” McQuaid said.

As for the UCI, McQuaid said the UCI and ASO are at war for the control of cycling, and have been since the UCI implimented the Pro Tour in 2005.

“It’s very much a fight between the UCI, which is trying to globalize the sport, and the Europeans which are trying to keep it within Europe, and those Europeans are led by ASO,” he said. “ASO is a company that makes 40 million euro a year from cycling, mainly from the Tour de France. … No other organizer in the world is making anywhere near that money. Most of them are just about keeping their heads over water, a lot of them are even losing money, but the ASO because of the product they have, which is a wonderful product, the Tour de France, are making vast sums of money, and they don’t want to change that.

“They’re dead scared that if this sport becomes a global sport, they won’t have the same handle on it, they won’t have the same power ’cause they might be a slightly smaller fish in a huge pond. And they’re dead scared of that. They prefer to be a big fish in a small pond.”

ASO has disputed these claims and steadfastly insists its publicly expressed reason for banning Astana is the only reason for banning Astana: past doping practices, nothing more.

In 10 Speed’s hour-long chat with McQuaid, the spat with ASO was among the topics of conversation covering international cycling. He also talked about the Floyd Landis case, the UCI’s legal action against former World Anti-Doping Agency president Dick Pound, and the fight against doping.

– On Landis, he admitted the case demonstrated errors made in the testing of the 2006 TdF winner’s sample by the French testing lab, and although he said the procedural errors need to be addressed, he defended the lab because of the workload and pressure it is under to get results quickly during the Tour. He also described his feeling on the day Landis’ test came back positive as being similar to “Where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot?”

– On ex-WADA chief Pound, he said the UCI had to take action against alleged defamatory  remarks by Pound to not only protect its reputation but to protect it against any future legal claims that may result from a rider’s doping cases. He said the case isn’t directed at WADA, but only at Pound, and he expressed disappointment that WADA dropped out of the UCI’s biological passport system to fight doping.

– As for the fight against doping, McQuaid praised the efforts of Slipstream, High Road, Astana and CSC in instituting anti-doping programs.

“They’re all showing a very strong commitment to the fight against doping and a very, very strong commitment to having clean riders and a clean team,” McQuaid said. “All the teams at the top level are riding on the same wave right now. But I think those four have led the way.”

And with that, we’ll move on to the complete transcript of the second half of 10 Speed’s interview with McQuaid. As I stated in Part 1, we hope to make these types of discussions a regular feature down the road.

Thanks for reading 10 Speed!

Pat McQuaid transcript, Part II

10 Speed: You talked about doping a little bit with (Operacion Puerto). Of course there’s the Floyd Landis thing going on. I read the Landis case, the majority opinion and the minority opinion. And it seems like there were a lot of mistakes made in the testing. Not talking about Floyd in particular, but does a preson who’s innocent have the odds stacked against him if there’s a false positive or something like that? It seems like, with the leaks that come from the lab or whoever, and the names get out and protocols are violated, it just seems that once a person is accused, they have a very hard time, they almost can never prove they’re innocent, they can just prove they’re not guilty. It seems like it’s almost stacked against them.

McQuaid: I know what you’re saying. I’m not a specialist in that area because a lot of that stuff in the likes of the Floyd Landis case went way beyond me and I stopped following it at a certain time because it was getting too technical for me, and I would leave it to the experts within the UCI and WADA and so forth to deal with that stuff. I do believe that a lot of the actual UCI rules were not, have not even been questioned by Floyd Landis. He has questioned certain mistakes in the labs. I don’t think, and I don’t want to prejudge because there’s an appeal going on at the moment and being considered, but from my knowledge of it, I don’t think the basic problem or the basic anti-doping violation was ever proven not to have happened by Floyd Landis’ people. OK, mistakes were made and human errors were made at the lab and this, that and the other, but I don’t think any of them violated the actual anti-doping infraction, that amount of testosterone in the system, or the amount of outside exogenis testosterone, I don’t think any of that was overcome within the process and so forth. I think it is true, and I would agree that the system, or the lab needs to tighten up its procedures so that these things aren’t brought into question, so that when, if a result comes out, that the appeals etc. etc., if there are appeals, they are made just on the basis of the result, and not on procedural errors, etc., etc. I don’t think that should be the case.

The labs need to become a little more professional, but having said that, I’m also aware that the pressure in which this lab works under, this particular lab at this particular time, because during the Tour de France, the organizers and French cycling and so forth are so desperate to have the results within a very short time frame, it puts huge pressure on this lab to do this and the lab has to work 24 hours a day. Now, you can say then there must be something wrong with the system if it has to do that. I would agree with you, but this is the only lab in France which is capable of working this type of procedure at this level and so forth. So therefore the French government should maybe invest in another lap or something like that to take the pressure off them. But the lab that does all the testing for the Tour de France, during the month of July is on 24 hours a day, people are working 24 hours a day to do all the testing required for the Tour de France and whatever events they have to do at the time. That in itself leads to human error when people are working through the night and this that and the other. It leads to human errors, and these human errors have been exposed. There may be a deficiency in the system, a fundamental deficiency in the system, which is causing this problem, but I don’t think it’s the system itself.

10 Speed: I’m glad you pointed out the pressure the lab’s under, because I haven’t heard anybody say that.

McQuaid: I’ll give you a perfect example, and I know because I was the first to be told about Landis. I got off the plane on the Tuesday, a plane in Munich I think when I first heard it. This is like the “where were you when John F. Kennedy was shot?” sort of scenario. I got off the plane in Munich, I was making a connection, on the Tuesday morning after the Tour de France, and I got a phone call, I opened my phone and switched it on, and there was a message from a lawyer in the offices and he says,:me, urgently, as soon as you switch your phone on” type of thing. I rang him and he said me, “are you alone?” I said, “Well, I just walked off the plane and I’m in corridor.” He says, “I got some bad news” and he told me what the story was. That was Tuesday, and the race finished on Sunday.

The tests he did after Stage 17, again, I was, interestingly enough, I was with Jean Marie LeBlanc, the director of the Tour de France at the time, I was in the car with him following Floyd Landis, the day he re-took the jersey into Morzine. And genuinely we thought we were watching a superb exploit on the Tour de France, one of the great classical exploits on the Tour de France. It has turned out now to be somewhat tainted, that exploit. But anyhow, that was the Thursday before and this is Tuesday when the result came out. You go back to the Sinkewitz case in the Tour de France last year, which was a test he did in early June and the result from the Cologne lab came, like, the 12th of July.

10 Speed: Yeah, there’s a big gap in there, wasn’t there?

McQuaid: It was big gap, so that shows what might be in the normal procedure, if the lab is working normally and this, that and the other. The labs don’t just do cycling, they do all sports. So if the lab is doing normal work. it takes a certain amount of time, but when you start to asking labs to produce stuff in much quicker periods of time, then you’re asking for the possibility of errors.

10 Speed: You mentioned a lab in another country. There was a case recently, the A-sample was done in France, the B was done in Belgium and it was negative and they wanted to do it again in France. Was it Iban Mayo?

McQuaid: Again, here’s a scenario, which again has to do with the lab and to do with the pressure of the system. France, as you know, closes down on the first of August. Everything closes, holiday, everything closes on the first of August, including this laboratory. Now, Mayo’s sample was taken on the Friday or Saturday before the end of the Tour and they produced the result for us, the UCI, maybe around the Wednesday that the A-sample was positive. However, they couldn’t do the B-sample because they were shutting down on the Saturday. So we had to ask Mayo’s people to suggest another lab, they suggested it could go to Ghent. The B sample was sent up to Ghent and the response was inconclusive because some labs are better at doing these things than others. It was inconclusive. So, the UCI had to make the decision what to do with the B-sample and there was enough of the urine left in the B-sample to send it to a third lab. We asked Mayo’s people where they wanted it to be done because the Paris lab was closed for a month, and it was sent to Sydney, I think, and Sydney came back with a either inconclusive or positive, one or the other, I’m not so sure, but ultimately it went back to the Paris lab. which at this stage was at the end of its holidays and it got the same result as it got the first time and eventually was proven positive.

Again, that was because of what you would call human factors. Normally if a lab gets an A-sample it’s positive, then the same lab does the B-sample. The individuals have experts overseeing the testing of the B-sample. In this case the lab was closed for holidays so it had to go somewhere else.

10 Speed: What’s going on with you guys and WADA. That just seems like, “why are we even bothering yelling at each other.” You know what I mean?

McQuaid: I know on the outside it could look like that, all right. In actual fact, it’s a reasonably serious situation from the UCI point of view because we need to some extent protect our image but also to protect ourself against further liability. I mean Mr. Pound, when he was president of WADA, made a lot of statements about the UCI which were very, very wrong, which we feel were very wrong. There may have been a certain amount of doping cases and doping going on, but he blamed, he said the UCI was, like, needed seeing-eye dogs, and needed white sticks and this, that and the other, we did nothing about it and so on and so on and so on and these type of things, and very much accused UCI of being virtually responsible for the doping that was going on in cycling. And we obviously completely reject this, but our problem is, if we for instance, taking a practical case, if we get a rider who ends up as a positive case and goes through the process and he goes to CAS and CAS rules that he’s positive and then he decides to go to a civil court, he can bring up the statements by Dick Pound in the civil court about the UCI which would influence the judge in his decision, and use them in his defense. So we have to have somebody neutral, a neutral judge to make a ruling on this, that either Mr. Pound was right or Mr. Pound was wrong, and if Mr. Pound was wrong, well, then the UCI was right. We have enough evidence in the amount of work we do and this, that and the other and fighting doping, and we think we are right and know so.

The same happened after the Festina case in 1998. Again, it went to court, and at that stage, a judge up in Lille, he ruled that the UCI, the ASO and the French federation were negligent in their duty of informing riders about the dangers of doping. The UCI and the French federation appealed that case and won the case, and the judge in the appeal stated the UCI could do no more than what it had done in informing riders about doping and the dangers of doping, etc, etc.. And from that point of view, it cleared the image of the UCI. We’re in a similar situation here because a person who is very well-renowned in the anti-doping fight has made defamatory statements about the UCI, and we need it on record that he was not correct in what he was saying.

10 Speed: I understand. From the outside it seems unseamly. I’ve read some stuff Dick Pound has said, and he can be kind of outrageous with the things he says. Now they are not going to participate in your biological passport?

McQuaid: No. The biological passport we’ve been working on for several years now. We knew it was a means of assisting us to get down to the more minute forms of doping, the miniscule, the small forms of doping. We knew, we were working with the Lausanne lab and working on the whole project for several years. We were more or less ready to move forward with it ourselves, you know, within the next year or two until the Paris summit last year, which was where WADA, the UCI and the French government participated together in a discussion over two days about the biological passport and the benefits of it, etc. etc. etc. and it was decided then in the tripod, a communique which we signed off that we would bring forward. The UCI then went into it 100 percent into it since then, with our teams and our riders, etc., we have some up with a budget of some $5 million euro to fund the program of the biological passport for this year.

Their lawyers were working on the rules and regulations, the legal aspects of the ultimate sanctions and this, that and the other. But I mean that’s something that doesn’t have to be sorted out now. The main thing is that testing is done, the sampling is done and that the profiles are built upon and delivered. We can do that on our own. It’s ultimately, and even WADA recognized that it’s our responsibility to do that and we will continue to do that. The sport of cycling will have the biological passport. WADA may decide to set up another project with another sport, but we’re going to be way, way ahead of them anyway.

I feel they’re wrong in taking the position they’ve taken on the basis of the fact it was because of our litigation against Dick Pound, because Dick Pound no longer has anything to do with WADA. The legal action has nothing to do with WADA, and they should have as such stayed within the program, but they decided not to.

10 Speed: Is ASO on board with that? Right?

McQuaid: Their reason may have been because the biological passport isn’t going to be ready by the first of July, I don’t think. ASO wanted it to be ready by the first of July. It may not be, only because of natural reasons. We’re not going to rush it. ASO is not contributing to it anyway. As part of their battle against the UCI, they’re refusing to contribute anything towards be it the biological passport or indeed the development of the sport. They contributed absolutely no money into the UCI funds now. As far as we’re concerned, they’re outside our system so therefore we work on the biological passport for the sport of cycling with no particular end line and no particular objective that it has to be in place by a certain date. We will have it in place as the year goes on. More and more riders will have their passport because more and more of them will have the adequate number of tests done to validate a biological passport.

10 Speed: What do you think of Slipstream, and I guess High Road is in that kind of program, and CSC and, well, Astana, even though they’re not allowed in the Tour de France?

McQuaid: I think they’re all good. They’re all doing a good job. They’re all showing a very strong commitment to the fight against doping and a very, very strong commitment to having clean riders and a clean team. … I don’t want to differentiate one team from the other, because I think all the teams at the top level are riding on the same wave right now. But I think those four have led the way. They have put extra money into extra programs to ensure their credibility and that their riders are aware they can’t do anything on their own. Remember it’s not teams by and large, or groups don’t dope, it’s individuals that dope with the help of somebody from outside the team usually are the ones who dope. I think more and more the riders on these teams realize there’s no point in even looking in that direction. ‘I’ve got to stay correct and proper.’ It’s a credit to them.
I do think also that the biological passport will diminish these teams to be doing extra stuff outside of the norm.

10 Speed: I think I read George Hincapie quoted that they do x-amount of tests with the team and they have to do x-amount of other tests with the biological passport. It gets to be a lot. It’s like you’re doing things twice as much as you have to.

McQuaid: Exactly, yeah, for the same result.

10 Speed: I read somewhere that the Giro might change their mind on Astana. Is there anything to that?

McQuaid: I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything myself. It’s coming up in a couple of weeks time so it’s a bit short notice now, but I haven’t heard much. I think it’s a great pity; the whole Astana thing is a great pity. Particularly with ASO, I think it’s wrong. I’ve puplicly stated here that I support Contador and I support the Astana team. I’ve been questioned, people have said to me, “Well, why do you support the Astana team? Look at what they have done, and this that and the other … you’re taking a big risk supporting them, etc.” I said my reason for supporting them is that I think it’s a non-justifiable decision. It’s not a correct, it’s not a just decision. If ASO had been consistent, they would have said to five teams, “We don’t want you in the Tour de France this year, or we want to watch you and see how your early season goes and see how you develop with the blood passport and all that type of thing.” Those five teams being Astana, one of them; High Road another one in its old T-Mobile form; and Rabobank being the other; Cofidis being the other and Saunier Duval being the other. Because all of those five years damaged the Tour de France last year, so therefore all of those five teams should have been treated the same by ASO this year. Why did they select Astana? I think it’s wrong. It’s not correct. It’s probably a political decision against UCI Pro Tour, UCI and against Johan Bruyneel, but it’s not a sporting decision.

That’s why I defended the position of Astana and Contador, because the UCI is there to defend the sporting interest of the sport and teams and so forth, and I think the ASO were wrong to single out Astana and not allow the winner of last year’s Tour de France and the third place to defend their position. It’s completely wrong. It’s scandalous and it’s wrong.

10 Speed: I thought they could have swept the podium with Klodie (Andreas Kloden). They could have had three guys on the podium

McQuaid: We’ll never know. But what about the poor guy who wins the race this year? He won’t be able to say, “I won the best race because the all the best riders in the world were there,” because last year’s winner is sitting looking at him. It’s not good for him either.

10 Speed: That’s just unfortunate. That whole thing is unfortunate all the way around. Do you really think they really had it in for Bruyneel?

McQuaid: I do, yeah, I definitely do, yeah.

10 Speed: Is that because they think Armstrong doped or something?

McQuaid: It’s not so much that … It’s just that Bruyneel and Armstrong between them during all of those years, Armstrong was so cocky and so confident and so, you might call it arrogant even in a certain way, in his approach to the race and his approach to his competitors and his approach to winning the race, and Bruyneel the same. They did it in a very calculated, a very strong way. Tey were there in a very professional way to win that race, and it’s because of that. It’s all very well, being involved in sports and everything is done sport, and sport is enjoying yourself and all this, that and the other, but when you get to events like the Tour de France you must become very professional and very, very calculating in your actions and how you do things. I think think just pissed off the French, excuse my language.

10 Speed: It seem like, like you said, the decision is not logical based on all the other things, so there has got to be more to it. It’s unfortunate the UCI is about the only group to stand with Astana, and Astana is kind of standing with you. The teams doing Paris-Nice … has anything become of the sanctions.

McQuaid: Nothing has become of that, no. We met with the riders last week and we told them there still can be sanctions that we understand their position, we understand they’re at the bottom of the line, and we’ll wait and see in the coming days and weeks what happens before we decide about sanctions on the part of the riders. We have started a process against the French federation and the president of the French federation because we feel they are more culpable in this whole scenario.

10 Speed: The riders and the teams, I mean, the sponsors still want the exposure, so they’re gonna want to ride. The riders they want to ride.

McQuaid: They want to ride, but by the same token when I spoke with the riders last week, with the CPA, which is the riders union so to speak. I said to them, “I know you want to ride all right, and I know you had to ride and I know your employers told you to ride and all that. But by the same token you made a protest at the start of one stage against an anti-doping control that was done on one of your fellow competitors in Belgium. When an anti-doping inspector turned up when the rider was arranging the funeral of a six-hour-old baby who died the previous day or soon after birth. And the anti-doping inspector did an anti-doping control on the rider, and you protested against the fact it was inhumane, and it wasn’t a very considerate thing to do.” I said, “I agree completely with you in terms of your protest, and I agree completely with you that things need to be done in a proper way and so forth in the anti-doping fight. But you could have easily, also done some protest the following day against the fact that this race wasn’t on the UCI calendar.” But they didn’t do that.

So they can make a difference if they want to. So everyone says they’re told to ride. It’s the same as the teams. We argued very much that the teams shouldn’t ride the race. They did ride the race, the 20 teams. They said, “Well, they had to ride, their sponsors, and this, that and the other.” And the teams association took a decision that they would all ride, and we said, “Yeah, you also could have taken the same decision to go to ASO, and say, ‘Hey, look, these 20 teams want to ride your race, but we won’t do it unless it’s on the UCI calendar.” Within 5 minutes, it would have been on the UCI calendar. They did have a choice.

10 Speed: Talking about all this stuff is interesting. There’s a lot of intrigue, and you got all these different groups and factions, but at the end of the day, it’s like, ‘Wow, you wish everybody could get on the same page and then this sport could just explode.’ It’s still doing it. The funny thing, in the States, all that stuff is so far removed from us, and what we see in front of us is races all over place and it’s really booming here. All that other stuff doesn’t matter. Even the doping issues in the past, they’re in the past. We have new teams Slipstream, High Road, Astana wants to come here and participate. That’s all cool.

McQuaid: I understand. I agree completely. I can see where you’re coming from, and I see what you’re saying is completely true. We’re the ones here who have to deal with all the carry on in Europe and so forth, and it’s very much, as I said at the very beginning of this interview, it’s very much a fight between the UCI, which is trying to globalize the sport and the Europeans which are trying to keep it within Europe. And those Europeans are led by ASO. ASO is a company that makes 40 million euro a year from cycling, mainly from the Tour de France. In fact, all from the Tour de France. That’s a huge sum of money that they make. No other organizer in the world is making anywhere near that money. Most of them are just about keeping their heads over water, a lot of them are even losing money, but the ASO because of the product they have, which is a wonderful product, the Tour de France, are making vast sums of money, and they don’t want to change that. They’re dead scared that if this sport becomes a global sport, they won’t have the same handle on it, they won’t have the same power ’cause they might be a slightly smaller fish in a huge pond. And they’re dead scared of that. They prefer to be a big fish in a small pond.

10 Speed: Do you worry about them getting a hold of the Vuelta.

McQuaid: I would, we would worry all right, yeah, because the Vuelta is an event which is going downhill and has been going downhill and has been going downhill the past couple of years. ASO would get in there and what they would do is blackmail the teams to ride the Vuelta. They would say, “If you want to ride the Tour de France, you gotta ride the Vuelta.” Just the same as they did this year to the teams saying, “If you to ride the Tour de France, you must ride Paris-Nice.” And they’ll start using all of this sort of leverage against the teams, forcing the teams into the other races. It’s not sporting. It’s not done for sporting reasons.

10 Speed: Why don’t you guys buy the Vuelta

McQuaid: Because we don’t have anywhere near that amount of money. It’s not the UCI role to buy races and owning races. We don’t own any races. We’re sanctioning and regulating. It’s not our role to own race. And, I mean, you’re looking at 20-30-40 million euro.

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