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David Lappartient (cropped) (Nicola, Wikimedia Commons, CC-by-sa 4.0).JPGNew UCI boss sets sights on earpieces and power meters
David Lappartient believes that pro riders’ radio earpieces leave cycling vulnerable to race fixing. The new UCI president has also expressed his distaste for power meters, saying that they made racing “sterile”.
"Sports betting is like an iceberg,” Lappartient told Het Laatste Nieuws. “Ninety percent of the bets are illegal and happen below the waterline.
“That's how it is in football, tennis and handball. I do not want to get to a day when cycling – once we have clambered from the valley of doping, and the fight against mechanical fraud has been successfully carried out – is undermined by corruption and gambling scandals.”
He believes that earpieces make cycling “very sensitive” to the influence of online betting as it provides a means by which competitors can be given instructions while a race is in progress.
"You can communicate directly with the rider in the race. Officially, the connection goes from a team car to a rider. But technologically, there is nothing that prevents me or you from calling the wearer of the yellow jersey during a stage of the Tour, right?"
Lappartient says he wants to ban race radios from the 2018 World Championships in Innsbruck.
The UCI, under Pat McQuaid, attempted to impose a similar ban on radios in 2011. However, the move met with resistance from some teams and they are currently still used in World Tour and other high level races.
Lappartient’s latest comments come shortly after he announced that he was looking to introduce a full ban on corticosteroids from 2019.
Alex has written for more cricket publications than the rest of the road.cc team combined. Despite the apparent evidence of this picture, he doesn't especially like cake.
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21 comments
It would take the French to engineer an excuse as complicated and feeble as that to enable the UCI to do what they have long wanted a ban on race radios! Poor timing though the new gereration of media savvy French riders like Bardet are just comming on song!
A simple solution to this would perhaps be a centrally controlled race radio, who is in the breaks and what the gap is only. This could potentially prevent the increased danger of the cars becoming more important.
Agree that power meters should be banned. Fine for training but leave it at home on race day. It will make the racing more interesting. Trial it and see.
i wasnt a fan of race radio for the same reason of dulling the sport with too much control and info but now beleive the other option of more close proximity to cars and bikes is worse. Bring in tech standards and have monitoring in place, f1 comms are recorded for audit, do the same if you are worried about fixing.
biggest issue - give the teams some revenue from tv rights and stop hogging the cash in your swiss cavern. This is what kills the sport.
The UCI has very little money from TV rights. That money goes to the race organisers like ASO. It has TV income from the World Championships, but trade teams don't enter that - even the TTT is going.
I agree that recording the radio would be a good idea. Probably simpler with a few miles of race track for a weekend than a daily changing 160 km parcour. If the technical challenge could be met it would be very interesting to hear some of it, though teams might have to be careful about giving away tactics..
so when was the last time anyone saw a tennis,handball or football player with a radio earpiece...cant but think he hasnt thought this through properly has he ?
When was the last time you saw a football team spread over 10 miles of French / Spanish / Italian countryside? With 21 other football teams around them?
#worstanalogyever
Clearly his point is that it is perfectly possible for sportsmen to collude with bookmakers without the aid of earpieces, so banning them on those grounds would be very unlikely to make much difference.
The more you think about it, the more absurd it it to think that riders would use team radio to do a quick spot of corruption mid-race, when that is probably one of their communication channels most open to scrutiny.
Presumably he'll also have to ban riders actually talking to each other as well, in case a GC contender agrees to let his breakaway partner take the stage win in return for help dropping his overall rivals, which would surely be corruption of the basest sort, and ripe for exploitation by nefarious far-east betting syndicates.
Yes exactly, I didn't think I'd need to explain it, but Mr President cites examples of betting corruption in sport and links them only to wanting to ban race radios in cycling, yet in none of the examples he cites are race radios or their equivs used, so how does he make the link between betting corruption in those sports and a race radio ? He might have been on less shaky ground citing cricket,where mobile phones are banned from players whilst involved in a game due to perceived outside betting influence on decisions in a game, IE runouts,declarations and so on, but he didnt.
In anycase I think the last or last but one edition of the Cycling Anthologies book demonstrated in a entirely fictional, or was it? context how a betting syndicate might be able to achieve certain spot bet results in cycling none of which I think iirc relied on a race radio
And if it leads to an increase of team cars in close proximity to riders as SDs try to shout instructions to their riders instead?
If the riders can't receive instruction/information and the team know they need to start chasing a breakaway, what happens?
Basically it encourage more riders going back to cars and all the safety issues that brings and also they'll be going back to hand held chalkboards to tell the breakaway and peleton the gaps.
Again another moto or two on top of the number that is too many as it is. What happens on a clmb, the riders can barely get through in some places so putting a motot with a chalkboard ahead is not safe at all.
Radios to stay, no problem losing power meters but as others have said it won't change much and it won't necessarily make cycling more interesting. In fact there's a possibility it may nake racing even more conservative.
Better for headline-grabbing than trying to organise the WorldTour calendar (which is a mess) or improve the women's sport.
IIRC he is pretty keen on catching people with motors in bikes too, another area which, while important for the integrity of the sport, is much easier to police (and far less likely to be happening) than doping.
Yep. Reads like a distraction technique for me.
Unless there's a massive problem that we don't know about, I'd rather see him sort out the above.
Why would betting on cycling be a massive problem? Anyone who thinks there's money to be made from betting on cycling can have my collection of emails from generous Nigerians with large and unexpected legacies they need to launder via my bank account.
Seriously, can you imagine a bookie running a book on who'll be in the breakaway tomorrow? it'd be like making a charitable donation to the drinks funds of the usual teams who always have someone in the breakaway.
The current market for next year's Tour de france looks like a typical mugs market - low odds, just a few familiar names, and designed to persuade mug punters that gambling's not just about inbred horses and dogs too stupid to run away from their handlers.
Come on David, be honest and say that youthink banning radios will make for better racing by taking the guidance and instruction away from the team DS's and making the riders think for themselves on the road. Likewise with power meters, it will encourage the riders to "give it a go and see what happens" which would be more exciting than them sitting there confident that they can produce X-amount of watts for Y-amount of minutes. Its about putting strategic thinking and physical judgement from the riders back into racing.
What a load of disingenuous crap. Surely he wants to ban radios because he believes it will make racing more exciting, so he really ought to be honest in his intentions, rather than invent a spurious reason that he presumably hopes is harder to argue against.
Not a good omen for the integrity of his term of office.
I actually hope they do ban powermeters, then when the racing is exactly the same the people moaning about it can move on to something else. With modern sports science and analysis riders are riding in the most efficient ways possible, they'll do that with or without a number on a screen.
Will a few riders win some stages because they dared to attack, probably, but there will probably be just as many stages where nobody attacks because they feel on the limit, possibly even more of them because riders might be afraid of going too far into the red. Will it change grand tours? I doubt it, the riders who win are the best at preparing, recovering, conserving their efforts and playing to their strengths, they'll still be the same guys. Just as the best track endurance riders are the best despite not having a readout to ride to.
Unless he knows something about race fixing that hasn't been let on before, it seems a very odd route to take rather than just banning them outright for sporting reasons or limiting them to one per team etc.
What a melvin. The riders would have a lot to say about this.
90% of sports betting is illegal?! If that's true, either the criminals are seriously inept at fixing results, or the betting companies are making serious losses on it.
If he wants to ban radios for sporting reasons, he should just say it. I'd support banning radios and power meters to increase the influence of rider judgement on the road... dont know if it would make much difference though!
Errr, wrong it's called encryption but I have no idea if race radios use encryption - anyone?
Race fixing is as old as bike racing, normally deals cut between riders in break aways.
I'd have thought that team radios are encrypted, else team cars would have 23 radios in them- the general race radio and their own team ones (which is the current set up), plus 21 monitoring other teams.
That doesn't sound likely to me - cycle racing is the epitome of gentlemanly sporting behaviour.