With a licence commission ruling on the Tour de France winner, Vincenzo Nibali’s, Astana team imminent the sport’s governing body, the UCI, said on Tuesday it was still awaiting the details of a Padua magistrates’ report into doping and tax evasion within cycling teams. That in turn meant the allegation that the disgraced trainer Michele Ferrari had contact with Astana would not immediately be taken into account in the 2015 licence decision process.
Following a spate of five positive tests in two teams under the Astana umbrella – including two for the WorldTour team led by Nibali – the UCI’s licence commission had deferred a decision on Astana’s WorldTour licence for 2015 while a review process examined the team’s ethics. That commission ruling is expected on Wednesday, a UCI spokesman told the Guardian.
The Italian newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport reported on Monday that as part of a four-year inquiry into doping and tax evasion, Padua magistrates had established a link between Astana and Ferrari based on an alleged photograph of the trainer at an Astana training camp in late 2013.
The paper was clear that no direct link with Ferrari had been established and the doctor issued a statement on Monday denying any contact with Astana and repeating Nibali’s denials over recent months – most notably in a Guardian interview – that he or his entourage had any links with the trainer who oversaw the blood doping programme that propelled Lance Armstrong to seven Tour de France wins.
The report has been sent to the disciplinary arm of the Italian Olympic Committee, CONI; it has been requested by the UCI but has yet to arrive there. “We have asked CONI to provide us with the report they have and we will review those files carefully and following due process,” a UCI spokesman told the Guardian.
In the long term, if the Padua inquiry were to establish a link between Ferrari and Astana it could have serious ramifications. In the short term the licence commission ruling will not be able to take the allegation into account because their verdict cannot be based on unsubstantiated press reports.
The licence commission review is usually a relatively dry matter; a commission of four Swiss lawyers and businessmen decide whether the world’s leading teams can be part of the top tier of professional cycling squads, who enjoy automatic entry into the biggest races in the sport.
Teams are awarded WorldTour licences on four grounds: financial, sporting, administrative and ethical.
The latter deals with several areas: anti-doping, keeping to financial and contractual obligations and “the principle of transparency and good faith”. In essence, the ruling is over whether they are judged sufficiently robust to run a WorldTour campaign through these criteria. In the past, for example, teams have simply run out of money mid-season. The other team which is currently in abeyance, France’s Europcar, apparently have one issue: a budget shortfall which their boss has said is around 5%.
Astana’s problems are in a different league; even before the Ferrari allegations surfaced there was speculation Astana might well have their application turned down.
The past few months have seen two positive tests in the Astana WorldTour team and three in the development squad. In addition the Astana head, Alexandr Vinokourov, was called upon by the UCI head, Brian Cookson, five months ago to testify to the independent commission on doping in cycling given his past doping ban and the fact he used to train with Ferrari; he has apparently yet to do so.
The way Astana reacted cannot have helped their cause. After the second positive test for the WorldTour squad the team waited a few days before announcing they would stop racing – as they were obliged to do, being members of the Movement for Credible Cycling – but the delay gave them just enough time to complete an important race in Kazakhstan.
That looked cynical as did the presence of a rider from their Continental team at the London track World Cup over the weekend wearing national federation colours, despite the federation having suspended the continental team from racing after its run of positives.
There is a precedent for a team having its WorldTour licence refused; that of Katusha in 2012-13.
On that occasion there were grounds for the auditors to be concerned over the team’s finances but it was their record on doping that seems to have tipped the balance.
Intriguingly – in terms of the Astana question – the commission’s members seem to have looked at Katyusha’s doping record over the longer term: a run of positive tests, hiring staff with doping records, hiring riders with positive tests in the past and whereabouts issues.
The process, according to Cookson, is a bipartite one: the commission recommends a course of action, the UCI’s management committee then decides what to do. The problem for Astana is that this autumn, the arguments against the team being part of the top tier have built and built like a snowball running down a hill. Given that it is unclear what information from the Italian inquiry has gone where – there is usually a delay in getting details transferred, particularly across borders – it may be that the commission defers a decision pending further evidence.
Even if Astana were refused a WorldTour licence initially they can – and probably would – appeal through the Court of Arbitration for Sport, which ruled in favour of Katusha just under two years ago. But the implications of a licence being refused are various, alongside the obvious damage to the image of cycling if the team of the winner of its flagship event were to be deemed to fall short on ethical grounds.
There is the possibility that the team might be awarded a second-tier licence, in which case they might have to rely on race organisers awarding them wild cards in major events such as the Tour de France, leading to the possibility that they might be denied entry.
