World Series Cycling a masterclass in how not to tell exciting stories

Posted on 12 December 2012 by Alex Murray

A while ago, I was trying to write something about the UCI, breakaway leagues/calendar reform and revenues. I became so bored researching it, I gave up.

But seeing as the UCI seems determined to chase around after a billionaire’s loose change in return for control, I thought I’d muse afresh. A memorandum of understanding, if you will.

The Gifted Group – who are ultimately the ones proposing to mess about with other people’s money and sport – told CyclingNews.com all about the plan for World Series Cycling (WSC) which seems to have confused “might” with “will”.

Lovely to see the term Grand Prix weekend being bandied around. Just like the lucrative world of Formula 1. In case you were wondering, here’s an idea of what you get over a four day Motorsport event like Monaco:

  • Thursday: F1 free practice x2; GP2 free practice and qualifying; Porsche Supercup free practice
  • Friday: Porsche Supercup qualifying; GP2 Race 1
  • Saturday: Formula Renault qualifying; F1 qualifying; GP2 Race 2
  • Sunday: Porsche Supercup race; Formula Renault race; F1 Grand Prix

Four different types of racing, with meaningful action on every day, all building towards the prestige event right at the end of the weekend. A great sporting model with paying punters aplenty.

Which translates into four unrelated one day competitions with no coherent narrative thread in the world of WSC.

In 2010 I said cycling needed a Kerry Packer type figure. It still does. The World Series Cycling (WSC) proposal is the most risk-averse attempt at taking a risk I’ve ever seen.

Cyclismas, the Inner Ring and Joe Lindsey’s Boulder Report have covered off, with great insight, the logistical and historical horrors:

Cyclismas: Call me a Dinosaur 

Inner Ring: World Series Cycling plans

Boulder Report: A World Series of what?

Rather than retread that ground, I’ve going to approach this from the Barthesian side and look at the failings in terms of offering a compelling narrative to the audience.

Trim, prune shuffle and interlink

“Cycling’s heartland is Europe and we need to protect it” you say. A significant portion of road cycling’s history resides in Europe, but we’ve lost far almost as many historically interesting races as remain there. And there are events outside Europe whose history is equally important to the modern sport – the Tour of Colombia for example.

The last thing the punters need is another ten Eneco Tours forced upon the marketplace. You could junk Vattenfall, E3 and Gent-Wevelgem from the top tier without anyone noticing if you were feeling like giving it a haircut.

In the case of those last two, one suggestion is to link them more closely to The Tour of Flanders by running the three races as a mini-series over five days. To expand on that, E3 and Gent-Wevelgem could be run as an opportunity to showcase some second tier teams with wildcards for Flanders on offer for the best placed of them.

Admittedly, this then runs up against the issue of where to fit Paris-Roubaix which is related. How about Tro Bro Leon drops into the middle Wednesday?

So there you have a five race sequence over two weeks that could be sold as a series. It maintains five existing events, groups them in a coherent series that fans can follow and event allows the possibility of an overall champion, a ‘King/Queen of the Cobbles’, crowned in Roubaix annually.

This would give you a similar narrative arc to ‘making the cut’ in golf or getting through qualifying in F1. There’s a narrative progression and a cast of characters that you can follow for the duration.

That’s perhaps the most depressing aspect of the WSC proposals: they seem to have been outlined by someone with no real understanding of what engages a sporting audience.

Same time next week for more of the same

One obvious criticism of the WSC proposal is that they’re locked in to a far too predictable format consisting of sprint, climb, time trial, rolling stages. The excitement of triathlon doesn’t come from being the fastest swimmer, runner or cyclist but from the way in which the three skills become interlinked in the overall result.

There’s a tradition in cinema of killing off big names as a narrative shock device for the audience. These removals of protagonists from the plot are as old as Homer, but as a rule of thumb no one ever made a great movie by killing your hero in the opening act and then not mentioning them again until the credits.

It’s impossible to see WSC’s reductive view, with its false separations, as anything other than a predictable guarantee for the audience that you don’t need to stay to the end of the picture. Once the sprint stage is over, you’ve effectively killed off Mark Cavendish.

I challenge you to find a successful series where the same star dies in the same place every weekend for the duration of the run in an entirely predictable manner. The closest I can think of is “Oh my god, they killed Kenny” in South Park, but his death was never done by rote or so predictably signposted.

Narrative stripped from context

The proscriptions of the format meant that a key element of narrative will be buried. Closing off the context so that Contador winning a climbing stage bears no relation to events on the other three days of racing is a terrible idea.

Realistically there is no overall classification narrative to follow because whichever way you structure it, the comings and goings of your group of protagonists are predictable. It’s a story without risk, jeopardy or adventure, the sporting equivalent of reading out the phone book (I do know people that can make that exciting, even borderline erotic but I wouldn’t invite them to do it on a regular basis).

What’s in it for broadcasters?

Gifted Group have made much of their proposal being what broadcasters want as if there’s some mystery which so far everyone in cycling has failed to appreciate.

Let me tell you what broadcasters want: they want something that runs to time, allows them to sell their junctions to advertisers, and keeps the audience watching to the end.

There’s a reason sports with fixed durations and predictable junctions (AKA half-time, end of the quarter, innings or over) have proved so popular as televised events.

Most broadcasters like two hour chunks when it comes to ‘striping’ their programming, as do those selling the rights (again, see F1 – races fit neatly into a two-hour broadcast window), which even with a following wind gives you about 100km of bike racing.

And with the best will in the world “coming up tomorrow, the individual time trial” is not going to get the casual fan all fired up, is it now?

Women control the majority of purchase decisions

Omega Pharma promoted Predictor (pregnancy test) and Silence (snoring treatment) through their sponsorship. You think either of them was aimed at men or with a view to men making a purchase decision about them?

Once again, some rich man has decided they’d like to own the trainset and the UCI has said “on you go”. Not a hint of evolving one of the biggest potential markets by harnessing existing race structures and bringing into play massive purchasing power that holds the key to some of the most lucrative advertising revenue in the market coming towards cycling.

There is absolutely nothing about WSC that says it’s going to attract and inspire the casual female fan.

I think I’ll stop now otherwise I’m going to draw blood bouncing my head off this desk.

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Team Sky zero tolerance policy or how not to address reality

Posted on 21 October 2012 by Alex Murray

Team Sky has never had an active zero tolerance policy, Team Sky has always had a zero tolerance policy on doping.

Team Sky would like you to know from their statement that

“Team Sky has had a clear position on doping from the very start. We are a clean team and have shown it is possible to win clean.”

That’s a strong top line to sell, and one which is not unique to Team Sky: Garmin Sharp along with High Road Sports and Cervelo Test Team have all made that their marquee asset.

The difference here is that none of those teams actively undermined their prime asset so badly as Team Sky do in the third paragraph:

“There is no place in Team Sky for those with an involvement in doping, whether past or present. This applies to management, support staff and riders.”

When was there ever zero tolerance?

At the outset, Team Sky relied on Scott Sunderland, who had been at CSC in the Basso years. It’s no slight on Sunderland, but there must have been an astounding naivety in play during the recruitment process to ignore that he’d been part of the operation that put convicted doper Ivan Basso on the Tour de France podium in 2005, then won him the Giro in 2006 before he got the ‘tin tack’ from the 2006 Tour and CSC before the season was out and subsequently got banned for his association with Dr Fuentes.

Given that this was all current and available information at the time Sunderland was engaged, it’s hard not to suggest that ‘wilful ignorance’ might be as apposite as ‘astoundingly naive’.

At its formation it recruited Sean Yates, a rider who has an unsanctioned involvement with doping as a rider and an unproven connection through his employment on at Motorola and as a directeur sportif at Discovery Channel and Astana.  A simple search of the cycling press archives would have turned up questions about Sean Yates’ own failure to stay right side of line. It’s interesting to note that British cycling had defended him.

In 2010 it recruited Dr Gert Leinders on a freelance basis and on the quiet, hoping no one would notice his past employment at Rabobank in a period when you might run out of fingers to count the doping stories about the team. The defensive attitude to criticism and subsequent non-renewal of contract. There is nothing intelligent or appropriate about the way Sky approached this matter.

Brailsford likes to emphasise how Team Sky builds on the British Cycling values of clean sport and attention to details. In the wake of all the post-Armstrong upheaval he told William Fotheringham in The Guardian

 “The information now, the context now, is different to what it was before. I’ve read the report and found it quite shocking, the light of that will direct the discussions”

Which would be the case if most of the information and context hadn’t been freely available  in L.A. Confidentiel : Les secrets de Lance Armstrong since 2004 and latterly From Lance to Landis: Inside the American Doping Controversy at the Tour de France

The great British conflict of interests

David Brailsford is British Cycling Performance Director. He is also Team Principal of Team Sky.

In a previous post on Lance Armstrong I wrote

“Take for example Emma O’Reilly’s account of effectively being asked to traffick substances across the Franco-Spanish border. It had to be taken on trust that David Walsh had got a second account corroborating events. It turns out that was Simon Lillistone, O’Reillly’s former husband (link is to £ Sunday Times site).”

Lillistone should be known to Brailsford through British Cycling. An inquiring mind with an attention to detail would have been aware of the links.

O’Reilly according to the New York Daily News has testimonials from Great Britain’s Victoria Pendleton. Here is that testimonial:

“It has been amazing to have Emma from the Body Clinic Hale as part of my wider Olympic performance team.”

Brailsford with his Great Britain hat on was OK with one of his charges receiving treatment from someone previous involved with “industrial doping”. It is not credible that as GB Performance Director he was not aware of O’Reilly’s contact with Pendleton given the precision which has so publicly been attributed to the planning of the Olympic programme .

As Michael Ashenden tells The Guardian

“They [Sky] have zero tolerance for doping. Great. But what constitutes doping according to them? Is it an anti-doping rule violation? Is it grounds for suspicion? Or are they merely relying on what the athlete tells them?”

It would seem that zero tolerance is only as strict as that which can be put in place without outside influence. As a policy it seems to have been formulated in the absence of Brailsford’s own experience.

Given The tale of David Millar, Dr Cecchini and Max Sciandri in Bad Blood: The Secret Life of the Tour de France,  do we assume then that Brailsford believes that his role in rehabilitating his friend David Millar as an international rider and selecting him for Great Britain was a past mistake that he has learned from and doesn’t wish to repeat?

Or that both Yates and Sciandri, despite questions about their past have been valuable servants of British Cycling’s current boom? There is a laughable absurdity to the fact that for years Britain’s best young riders were schooled by a protege and friend of Cecchini.

Barry, to some degree, was an open secret – questions and eyebrows were raised when he was hired by Sky given his past employers. Through his Team High Road experience, there was evidence of an attitude change and it’s hard to imagine that in the process of referencing him, Team Sky’s recruitment policy wouldn’t have had indications as to his past.

Likewise, Mick Rogers’ Ferrari connection was pretty widely discussed and a rumour that I’d certainly been aware of before he signed for Team Sky. What does that say for the quality of due diligence being undertaken by management? It’s all well and good looking at the numbers on their SRM, but that seems to have been the only thing they looked at.

Yet, on BBC Radio 5 live Brailsford praised Barry and his attitude at Team Sky in the same breath as effectively handing him his cards, despite being a retired rider.

All change, no change

It’s surreal to hear talk that the policy hasn’t changed, never changed and has always been adherred to given Brailsford admits to talking to Neal Stephens, formerly of Festina and Liberty-Seguros and took Michael Barry on face value despite allegations that were current at the time of his hiring.

The PR campaign around this announcement is prejudicial to riders who decide not to re-sign for reasons other than doping, because already any rider who announces they are going elsewhere is open to speculation about their reasons for doing so. It may blight their career and reputation in the current climate of fear.

Will they make clear which staff are which? And does it even matter if they do?

All their policy and declaration contribute to the creeping sense of keep your mouth shut and your head down, which is precisely what led to omertà.

If was sky rider who had past issues, I would start looking for a 2014 deal and brazen it out. Because there are better places to be than where you career development is less important than Team Sky clinging on to their last vestiges of dignity in a PR battle they lost before they even started.

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In defence of Paul Kimmage

Posted on 20 September 2012 by Alex Murray

“Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We got to fight the powers that be” – Chuck D

Paul Kimmage is an exemplary journalist. A cantankerous goat he may be at times, but he is an incredible journalist with an ability to get inside an athlete’s head that makes me weep with envy.

Paul Kimmage (centre) confronts Lance Armstrong at the Tour of California

Paul Kimmage (centre) confronts Lance Armstrong at the Tour of California. © Doug Pensinger/Getty Images

I’ve written before about how Kimmage changed the game in cycling journalism, not once but twice. That second game changer – releasing a verbatim transcript of his Floyd Landis interview after it was hacked to pieces by lawyers – may even have contributed to his parting with The Sunday Times.

Great journalists are consistent in their position and honest about their views. Kimmage has always been consistent in seeking out the source of an athlete’s drive, fighting artifice and deception as it is presented to him, and determined to shout for the athlete who engages in an interview or feature with honesty, regardless of what that truth may be.

Those qualities are almost certainly why Bradley Wiggins wanted him off the Team Sky bus in 2010, when by his own admission wasn’t delivering on what his role demanded. I’d hazard that Kimmage saw through the front and bluster of ‘Brad/Wiggo’ and he didn’t like it.

Those qualities are what gained the confidence of Floyd Landis, a man he had mercilessly pushed to tell the truth. They are what made him one of the few journalists to continue to stand up and ask the hard questions in press conferences. They are what made Lance Armstrong so determined to publicly defame him at the Tour of California.

It’s why, when faced by an unprecedented series of allegations against the most senior figures in the UCI, past and  present – Hein Verbruggen and Pat McQuaid – they are chasing him in the Swiss courts for defamation.

Let’s be clear, the basis for this case includes articles and statements made in the British press, which falls within the jurisdiction of English libel law, almost universally acknowledged to be one of the most favourable to the complainant in any legal system. They have chose to make their case against Kimmage as an individual, and not against the publications (L’Equipe and The Sunday Times in particular) in a Swiss court with the use of https://naegeliusa.com/ court reporters.

This is unheard of in my experience of journalism and to my mind speaks of a suit aimed at silencing a critic whose opinion looks increasingly to be that made in good faith and supported by evidence.

NY Velocity has flagged up  a Paul Kimmage defense fund -which Digger Forum set up – which you are welcome to donate to.

If you are a Swiss lawyer with expertise in defamation law and the defence thereof and would be willing to work pro bono on Paul Kimmage’s behalf on this case, feel free to make yourself known to those mentioned above.

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