Grand Tours Cutting Their Own Throats?

[Tom Kunich]

Does anyone believe that bicycle racing can exist outside of an
international governing body and carry any significance with the public
these days?

I'm guessing that if you can say "World Champion Paulo Bettini" when you're
describing a Grand Tour stage that you're not impressing anyone. Anyone
notice that no one pays any attention to "Round The World Sailboat Races"?

 

[Tom Kunich]

"Tom Kunich" <cyclintom@yahoo. com> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Does anyone believe that bicycle racing can exist outside of an
> international governing body and carry any significance with the public
> these days?
>
> I'm guessing that if you can (CAN'T) say "World Champion Paulo Bettini"
> when you're describing a Grand Tour stage that you're not impressing
> anyone. Anyone notice that no one pays any attention to "Round The World
> Sailboat Races"?
>
>

 

[Davey Crockett]

"Tom Kunich" a écrit profondement:

| "Tom Kunich" <cyclintom@yahoo. com> wrote in message
| news:[email protected]...
| > Does anyone believe that bicycle racing can exist outside of an
| > international governing body and carry any significance with the
| > public these days?
| >
| > I'm guessing that if you can (CAN'T) say "World Champion Paulo
| > Bettini" when you're describing a Grand Tour stage that you're not
| > impressing anyone. Anyone notice that no one pays any attention to
| > "Round The World Sailboat Races"?

A major problem with cycling currently is that it has permitted a
cancerous Bureaucracy to develop which imposes an ever increasing
drain on the ever decreasing financial resources available to the
sport and for which the average member of a UCI affiliate, be he
international professional or weekend warrior, receives no benefit
whatsoever. The UCI bureaucracy is interested primarily in
accumulating even greater powers to the detriment of the sport in
general but greatly to the benefit of the individual bureaucrat's
Private Secret Pension Plan and the wellbeing of the Bars,
Restaurants, Hotels and Whores of Aigle and such cities as maintain
National and/or Provincial branches of the Parasite Parent UCI,
governed currently by ex-president Hein Verberuggen through the medium
a Grossly Fat, Flabby Idiot, Patrick McQuaid who, barring Verbruggen's
guidance, would be lucky if could find his Ass with Both Hands or get
Himself Put in a Whorehouse with a Fistful of Hundred Euro Bells.

--
Davey Crockett
-
Driving a Stake through the
Heart of the Politically Correct
http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg146/sylviastolz/freesylvia.jpg

 

[Tom Kunich]

"Davey Crockett" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
> A major problem with cycling currently is that it has permitted a
> cancerous Bureaucracy to develop which imposes an ever increasing
> drain on the ever decreasing financial resources available to the
> sport and for which the average member of a UCI affiliate, be he
> international professional or weekend warrior, receives no benefit
> whatsoever. The UCI bureaucracy is interested primarily in
> accumulating even greater powers to the detriment of the sport in
> general but greatly to the benefit of the individual bureaucrat's
> Private Secret Pension Plan and the wellbeing of the Bars,
> Restaurants, Hotels and Whores of Aigle and such cities as maintain
> National and/or Provincial branches of the Parasite Parent UCI,
> governed currently by ex-president Hein Verberuggen through the medium
> a Grossly Fat, Flabby Idiot, Patrick McQuaid who, barring Verbruggen's
> guidance, would be lucky if could find his Ass with Both Hands or get
> Himself Put in a Whorehouse with a Fistful of Hundred Euro Bells.

Nevertheless the problem is that we do need an organization like the UCI to
set rules and standards for racing and we do need organizations such as ASO
to put on the races.

The problem as you point out is that such organizations tend to turn into
parasites though those such as the ASO have less tendency to do so since
they need to make a commercial profit with their governments breathing down
their necks. The UCI and such organizations generally are under a whole lot
less scrutiny though Lord knows that shouldn't be the case.

 

[GoneBeforeMyTime]

"Davey Crockett" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...

> governed currently by ex-president Hein Verberuggen

Snip...

Once Leontion told Hein directly, about the UCI rankings, no one knows them
or respects them. Then the circus started with Festina, and the scandals of
the last decade, but certainly your general point is good, I don't think
anyone would argue that the whole structure should of been build on a rock,
and not the shifting sand! What the rock is, is open to debate. Regardless,
the sport is like a camera out of focus, constantly trying to acquire focus
for the right exposure to composition. Talking about looking through a lens
darkly too, thanks to the relentless doping scandals that should be back
page news as far as I am concerned, bad exposure to composition! The sport
seems to have a poor depth of field, which is critical to good composition!
I think cycling is stuck in the macro mode taking mostly snapshots of a few
bad apples, when the real destroyers are disguised as the good guys. Cycling
just doesn't have the right depth of field, (IMO), and is severely lopsided.
What would happen if the media decided not to focus on doping stories
anymore, but instead printed a whole range of interesting pieces? Big media
usually marches to the drum of its owners, and increasingly I keep thinking,
who owns this sport? Nobody, it belongs to the fans and their heroes,
certainly not the media, UCI and the doping organizations. The biggest
detriments to cycling have been the doping organizations, regardless of the
logic behind it, that's the way it panned out. The biggest benefits to
cycling must certainly of came about since the invention of the Internet,
which thousands of Internet websites all over the world, big or small, which
have in some small way made cycling better since the tools of the Internet
were give to us. We salute all those thousand points of light.



GBMT

 

[Ryan Cousineau]

In article <[email protected]>,
"Tom Kunich" <cyclintom@yahoo. com> wrote:

> "Davey Crockett" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
> >
> > A major problem with cycling currently is that it has permitted a
> > cancerous Bureaucracy to develop which imposes an ever increasing
> > drain on the ever decreasing financial resources available to the
> > sport and for which the average member of a UCI affiliate, be he
> > international professional or weekend warrior, receives no benefit
> > whatsoever. The UCI bureaucracy is interested primarily in
> > accumulating even greater powers to the detriment of the sport in
> > general but greatly to the benefit of the individual bureaucrat's
> > Private Secret Pension Plan and the wellbeing of the Bars,
> > Restaurants, Hotels and Whores of Aigle and such cities as maintain
> > National and/or Provincial branches of the Parasite Parent UCI,
> > governed currently by ex-president Hein Verberuggen through the medium
> > a Grossly Fat, Flabby Idiot, Patrick McQuaid who, barring Verbruggen's
> > guidance, would be lucky if could find his Ass with Both Hands or get
> > Himself Put in a Whorehouse with a Fistful of Hundred Euro Bells.
>
> Nevertheless the problem is that we do need an organization like the UCI to
> set rules and standards for racing and we do need organizations such as ASO
> to put on the races.

Tom: the ASO could set its own rules, if necessary. You think all that
stuff about sponsorless yellow bicycles and repairing one's own machine
was made up by the UCI? That was all Desgrange.

It has been convenient for the ASO to let the UCI do the management of
the rules because they're convenient, available, and it's easy on the
teams to have one set of rules for all races. No fiddly issues with
three different saddle-nose/BB distance rules or some such.

The day that the ASO goes independent, they'll photocopy the UCI
rulebook, put "ASO" stickers over the UCI logos, and send invitations to
a bunch of top-level teams, plus AG2r.

And they'll get entries, too, because they have the Tour and a bunch of
other great races, and the UCI has the Eneco Tour.

> The problem as you point out is that such organizations tend to turn into
> parasites though those such as the ASO have less tendency to do so since
> they need to make a commercial profit with their governments breathing down
> their necks. The UCI and such organizations generally are under a whole lot
> less scrutiny though Lord knows that shouldn't be the case.

I don't think the ASO has a lot of government pressure to turn a profit,
but I'm sure that the corporate overlords at EPA insist on it.

The UCI had a clever idea about unifying the best teams and the best
events, both as a simplification for the teams (knowing for sure that
they were either in or out of the elite events as a ProTour team), and
as an impetus for a points competition worth caring about.

Unfortunately, they took that modest idea and assumed it was important
in its own right. I don't even ascribe corruption to this failure as I
do incompetence. It wasn't so much a diabolical plan as one that was,
what's the phrase? Oh yes, not well thought out.

--
Ryan Cousineau [email protected] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"In other newsgroups, they killfile trolls."
"In rec.bicycles.racing, we coach them."

 

[Tom Kunich]

"Ryan Cousineau" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:rcousine-307517.01282412022008@[74.223.185.199.nw.nuvox.net]...
>
> Tom: the ASO could set its own rules, if necessary. You think all that
> stuff about sponsorless yellow bicycles and repairing one's own machine
> was made up by the UCI? That was all Desgrange.

Err, does that sound like sane rules? So, do you discover the strongest
cyclist that way?

> It has been convenient for the ASO to let the UCI do the management of
> the rules because they're convenient, available, and it's easy on the
> teams to have one set of rules for all races.

You need a set of rules set by a third organization that has no real
attachment to spectacle.

> And they'll get entries, too, because they have the Tour and a bunch of
> other great races, and the UCI has the Eneco Tour.

So, whose the best football player in the world?

> I don't think the ASO has a lot of government pressure to turn a profit,
> but I'm sure that the corporate overlords at EPA insist on it.

Huh? I wonder if you're earning a living or on welfare. ASO wants to make a
profit and France wants a LOT of taxes. Making a profit with all those taxes
being taken is a difficult business at best.

 

[Donald Munro]

Tom Kunich wrote:
> So, whose the best football player in the world?

Kaka, according to FIFA.

 

[Michael Press]

In article
<rcousine-307517.01282412022008@[74.223.185.199.nw.nuvox.net]>,
Ryan Cousineau <[email protected]> wrote:

> Unfortunately, they took that modest idea and assumed it was important
> in its own right. I don't even ascribe corruption to this failure as I
> do incompetence. It wasn't so much a diabolical plan as one that was,
> what's the phrase? Oh yes, not well thought out.

They _are_ corrupt. They are not incompetent.
They are quite competent to pocket every dime
that comes their way.

What's the idea with saying somebody is not
malicious, merely incompetent. I do not buy it.
If it's brown, gooey, and smells of
HS, skatole, indole, & mercaptans, then it's ordure.

--
Michael Press

 

[Ryan Cousineau]

In article <[email protected]>,
"Tom Kunich" <cyclintom@yahoo. com> wrote:

> "Ryan Cousineau" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:rcousine-307517.01282412022008@[74.223.185.199.nw.nuvox.net]...
> >
> > Tom: the ASO could set its own rules, if necessary. You think all that
> > stuff about sponsorless yellow bicycles and repairing one's own machine
> > was made up by the UCI? That was all Desgrange.
>
> Err, does that sound like sane rules? So, do you discover the strongest
> cyclist that way?

Well no, but they hardly impaired the popularity of the Tour. Indeed,
Desgrange dropped both regulations all on his own.

> > It has been convenient for the ASO to let the UCI do the management of
> > the rules because they're convenient, available, and it's easy on the
> > teams to have one set of rules for all races.
>
> You need a set of rules set by a third organization that has no real
> attachment to spectacle.

I think this is rather like worrying that the same organization that
books a stadium for the Super Bowl every year also hires the refs and
decides how many points a conversion is worth.

They should totally dump the kicked conversion and institute the rouge
point, by the way.

> > And they'll get entries, too, because they have the Tour and a bunch of
> > other great races, and the UCI has the Eneco Tour.
>
> So, whose the best football player in the world?

I don't know who the best footballer in the world is, but the best
cyclist is the one who wins the Tour. And that is why the ProTour didn't
matter.

> > I don't think the ASO has a lot of government pressure to turn a profit,
> > but I'm sure that the corporate overlords at EPA insist on it.
>
> Huh? I wonder if you're earning a living or on welfare. ASO wants to make a
> profit and France wants a LOT of taxes. Making a profit with all those taxes
> being taken is a difficult business at best.

I don't know what to say to this. The ASO is a private company, and one
whose essential business is virtually unexportable. They're stuck with
France.

As for the French government, I'm sure they want French industries to
turn a profit, in principle, but that in practice they are about as
focused on the day-to-day operations of the ASO as they were on Chung's
graph-paper output at the Institut Nationale Derogation de Hyperpowers,
or whatever it was.

I'm no expert on the French economy, but my little reading on the
subject leads me to believe that the real headaches are for
entrepreneurs, not established enterprises. But this is far, far from
the point we were talking about earlier, which was the necessary or
useful functions of the ASO and the UCI.

I'll sum up my point: the UCI offered a few modestly useful services
which the ASO would miss a little if it was deprived of them.

The ASO, conversely, does things which the UCI could not possibly
undertake. I believe not for a moment that the UCI has anything like the
structure or knowledge to manage the logistics of the largest bicycle
race on the planet. It's probably a trick that only the ASO, and maybe a
few other very specialized organizations, could even dream of engaging
in.

--
Ryan Cousineau [email protected] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"In other newsgroups, they killfile trolls."
"In rec.bicycles.racing, we coach them."

 

[Donald Munro]

Ryan Cousineau wrote:
> I don't know who the best footballer in the world is, but the best cyclist
> is the one who wins the Tour.

If you want a troll to work, don't bury it amongst a large
quantity of unrelated prolix prose.