Oh, halle-freaking-lujah, Paris-Nice won’t suck this year.

By Jessica | Permalink |

No Comments | March 5th, 2007 | Trackback

fireworks It looks like the Monday pow-wow in Belgium has had a positive outcome. From Reuters:

Cycling’s major teams will be able to compete in the Paris-Nice race without fear of sanctions after the International Cycling Union (UCI) and the race organisers reached an agreement on Monday.

In a marathon meeting in Brussels among UCI officials, ASO and the International Professional Cycling Teams (IPCT), it was agreed that the teams could ride unhindered.

“We are going to ride Paris-Nice,” IPCT president Patrick Lefevere said following nine hours of talks.

“We have a consensus for the moment that we can live with.”

Under the temporary agreement, which extends to the end of the season, all sides will meet once a month with a view to reaching a long-term solution by Sept. 21, five days before the start of the world cycling championships.

It averts the potential crises which threatened the sport’s showpiece events — the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Tour of Spain.

That’s the good news. And it’s effing fantastically good news for cyclists and fans alike. The bad news (you knew there had to be some bad news, right?) is that Pat McQuaid seems a bit deluded:

“I am happy that the sport has got out of this crisis and look forward to a season where cycling can be the priority,” McQuaid said on Monday.

“The agreement, which we have agreed for this season, we can work on and at least everyone is around the table and talking. Most important is that cycling goes on.”

Yes, Pat, we’re all happy that you reached an 11th-hour agreement (seriously, couldn’t they have had this discussion weeks ago??) and everything, but to say “the sport has got out of this crisis” is a bit on the optimistic side. I’d be willing to bet that the people on both sides of the argument didn’t go from threatening each other to hugging each other after today’s meeting. Something tells me this ain’t nearly over yet.

Anyway, thanks to anyone who made offerings to the peloton gods over the weekend, including the husband who, when I asked him yesterday whether he thought today’s meeting would end well, said he did. He even went so far as to give his optimism a color - he said it was yellow with a hint of orange. I shan’t be chuckling over that anymore, as it clearly worked. Well done, dear.

UPDATE: There’s another article about the brokered peace deal at VeloNews, including this tidbit not in the Reuters piece:

The UCI compromised with the Big Three and agreed to include only 18 of the 20 ProTour teams at events organized by ASO, RCS and Unipublic. That means that new ProTour teams Astana and Unibet.com will have to bank on wild-card invitations to race in those races.