Brian Cookson has ruled out a wholesale clean-out of doping “bad apples”, despite the damning evidence of the Cycling Independent Reform Commission (CIRC) report on the professional sport’s doping culture. Cookson hopes to introduce a fit-and- proper person test by the start of the 2016 racing calendar.
“We want to strengthen our rules around who can be involved with a team,” Cookson, president of the International Cycling Union (UCI), the world governing body, said.
“We will look at our licensing requirements and use that in conjunction with the better rules that we have with the Wada [World Anti-Doping Agency] code about collusion and whistleblowing, and see if we can’t get a better definition of who is a fit-and-proper person to be involved with a team.
“Does that mean that everybody who’s ever had a doping test will be driven out of the sport? Probably not, because we have to bear in mind employment law, the statute of limitations and so on. We have to make sure that any activity we take is legally defensible.
“I hope by next season we will have a stronger set of rules in place. The UCI licence commission has some flexibility in terms of how it interprets the ethical requirements, and clearly what was acceptable ten or 15 years ago is no longer ethically acceptable.”
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Among those who testified to CIRC were Bjarne Riis and Alexander Vinokourov, both former dopers and now running teams led by Alberto Contador and Vincenzo Nibali, the former Tour de France champions.
“If you look at individuals who have confessed to doping, or been sanctioned in the past, there’s a range of levels of contrition,” Cookson said. “Some appear to be genuine, by campaigning or getting involved to help current generations avoid making the same mistakes, while others appear to be more reluctant to give any indication of being remorseful. Making an assessment of who is on which side of that divide is a difficult thing to do.”
Cookson said that the CIRC report was never likely to be a sequel to the United States Andi-Doping Agency investigation into Lance Armstrong.
“It wasn’t intended to be,” he said. “I think they’ve done a good job within the brief.
“But there are probably people who had an unrealistic expectation of what would be discovered. It didn’t have powers to compel people to testify, it couldn’t sanction people for perjuring themselves or giving wrong information and it was about giving us lessons for the future, as much as a detailed analysis about the past.
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“We all had a pretty good idea of what was happening,” he said. “The report’s given us a very good analysis of certain key incidents in the past, and in my view is very critical of UCI leadership at the time.”
Cookson admitted he was surprised that some high-profile critics, including former professionals David Millar and Christophe Bassons — the Armstrong whistleblower, who yesterday told The Times that he was never contacted by CIRC — were not among the witnesses.
“I am quite surprised at the number of people who are now saying they didn’t give evidence, or weren’t asked,” Cookson said. “There was a pretty open-door policy and we didn’t tell them who they could or couldn’t speak to, and it’s only now that I am learning that certain individuals consider that they were overlooked.
“But I’m also surprised that those individuals didn’t find the time to go to the commission. If they felt they had important information to give I think it may have been incumbent upon them to make that effort.”
Pat McQuaid, meanwhile, says he is proud of his legacy as UCI president despite the CIRC report alleging that the governing body was partially responsible for failing to control drug use among elite cyclists around the turn of the century.
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“When I took over as president of the UCI, one of my main aims was to fight against doping,” McQuaid said.
“Everybody knows that, and everybody knows the work that I have done in the fight against doping, and UCI is now one of the leading international federations in the fight against doping. The legacy I have left behind there, I am quite proud of.”