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| Abbreviation | UCI |
|---|---|
| Formation | 14 April 1900; 125 years ago (1900-04-14) |
| Founded at | Paris,France |
| Type | Sports federation |
| Headquarters | Aigle, Switzerland |
Region served | Worldwide |
President | David Lappartient |
Main organ | Congress |
| Affiliations | International Olympic Committee |
TheUnion Cycliste Internationale (French pronunciation:[ynjɔ̃siklistɛ̃tɛʁnɑsjɔnal];UCI; English:International Cycling Union[1][2]) is the worldgoverning body for sportscycling and oversees international competitive cycling events. The UCI is based inAigle, Switzerland.
The UCI issues racing licenses to riders and enforces disciplinary rules, such as in matters ofdoping. The UCI also manages the classification of races and the points ranking system in various cycling disciplines includingroad andtrack cycling,mountain biking,cyclo-cross,Gravel, andBMX, for both men and women, amateur and professional. It also oversees theWorld Championships.
After theRussian invasion of Ukraine, the UCI said that Russian and Belarusian teams were forbidden from competing in international events.[3] It also stripped both Russia and Belarus of scheduled events.[3]
The UCI was founded on 14 April 1900[4] inParis by the national cycling sports organisations of Belgium, the United States, France, Italy, and Switzerland. It replaced theInternational Cycling Association (ICA) by setting up in opposition in a row over whetherGreat Britain should be allowed just one team at the world Championships or separate teams representing England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Britain found itself outflanked, and it was not able to join the UCI – under the conditions the UCI had imposed – until 1903.[5]
There were originally 30 countries affiliated to the union. They did not have equal voting power and some had no vote at all. Votes were distributed by the number of tracks, orvelodromes, that each nation claimed. France had 18 votes, the highest number, and Germany and Italy 14 each. Britain had eight, a number the writer Bill Mills said was acquired "by including many rather doubtful grass tracks."[5]
In 1965, under the pressure of theIOC, when the Olympics was an amateur event, the UCI created two subsidiary bodies, the International Amateur Cycling Federation (Fédération Internationale Amateur de Cyclisme or FIAC) and the International Professional Cycling Federation (Fédération Internationale de Cyclisme Professionnel or FICP). The UCI assumed a role coordinating both bodies.
The FIAC was based inRome, the FICP in Luxembourg, and the UCI inGeneva.
The FIAC was the bigger of the two organisations, with 127 member federations across all five continents. It was dominated by the countries of theEastern Bloc which were amateur. The FIAC arranged representation of cycling at theOlympic Games, and FIAC cyclists competed against FICP members on only rare occasions. In 1992, the UCI reunified the FIAC and FICP, and merged them back into the UCI. The combined organisation then relocated to Aigle, close to the IOC in Lausanne.
In 2004, the UCI constructed a 200-metrevelodrome at the newWorld Cycling Centre adjacent to its headquarters.
In September 2007 the UCI announced that it had decided to award ProTour status for the first time ever to an event outside of Europe; the Tour Down Under in Adelaide, Australia. The announcement followed negotiations between UCI President Pat McQuaid andSouth Australian PremierMike Rann.[6]
In 2013Tracey Gaudry became the first woman appointed as vice president of the UCI.[7]
After the2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the UCI said that Russian and Belarusian teams are forbidden from competing in international events.[3] It also stripped both Russia and Belarus of scheduled events.[3]
On 3 May 2023, the UCI approved a process to review and allow Russian and Belarusian riders to participant in UCI events as Individual neutral athletes.[8]
The UCI organises cycling's world championships, administration of which it gives to member nations. The first championships were on the road and on the track. They were allocated originally to member nations in turn, on condition the country was deemed competent and that it could guarantee ticket sales.[5] A nation given a championship or series of championships was required to pay the UCI 30 per cent of ticket receipts from the track and 10 per cent from the road. Of this, the UCI kept 30 per cent and gave the rest to competing nations in proportion to the number of events in which it competed. The highest gate money in this pre-war era was 600 000 francs in Paris in 1903.[9]
There were originally five championships: amateur and professional sprint, amateur and professional road race, and professionalMotor-paced racing. The road race was traditionally a massed start but did not have to be: Britain organised its road championship before the war as a time trial, theNational Cyclists Union believing it best to run races against the clock, and without publicity before the start, to avoid police attention. Continental European organisers generally preferred massed races on circuits, fenced throughout or along the finish to charge for entry.
The original records were on the track: unpaced, human-paced and mechanically paced. They were promoted for three classes of bicycle: solos, tandems and unusual machines such as what are now known as recumbents, on which the rider lies horizontal. Distances were imperial and metric, from 440 yards and 500 metres to 24 hours.[5] The UCI bannedrecumbents in competitions and in record attempts on 1 April 1934. Later changes included restrictions on riding positions of the sort that affectedGraeme Obree in the 1990s and the banning in 2000 of all frames that did not have a seat tube.
The winner of a UCI World Championship title is awarded arainbow jersey, white with five coloured bands on the chest. This jersey can be worn in only the discipline, specialty and category of competition in which it was awarded, and expires on the day before the following world championship event. Former champions are permitted to wear rainbow piping on the cuffs and collar of their clothing.
For decades, professional road cyclists refused to wearhelmets. The first serious attempt by the UCI to introduce compulsory helmet use was the 1991Paris–Nice race, which resulted in a riders' strike, and the UCI abandoned the idea.[10]
After the death ofAndrei Kivilev in the 2003 Paris–Nice, new rules were introduced on 5 May 2003,[11] with the2003 Giro d'Italia being the first major race affected. The 2003 rules allowed for discarding the helmets during final climbs of at least 5 kilometres in length;[12] subsequent revisions made helmet use mandatory at all times.
The UCI was accused of accepting a bribe in the 1990s to introduce thekeirin, a track cycling race, into the Olympics. An investigation by the BBC claims that the UCI was paid approximately $3,000,000 by Japanese sources to add the race to the Olympic programme, something denied by the UCI.[13]
WhenFloyd Landis confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career in May 2010, he alleged that the UCI had accepted a bribe fromLance Armstrong to cover up anEPO positive after the 2001 Tour de Suisse.[14]
Discussing doping in 2012, UCI presidentPat McQuaid emphasised the fact that his organisation was "the first entity to introduce blood tests, the first sport to introduce the test for EPO".[15]
The UCI has sued or threatened to sue several cyclists, journalists, and writers for defamation after they accused it of corruption or other misdeeds related to doping.[16] Many, though not all, of these suits are heard in the Est Vaudois district court ofVevey, Switzerland[17]
In 2002, the UCI suedFestinasoigneurWilly Voet over claims in his bookBreaking the Chain.[18] In 2004 the UCI won the case,[19] and in 2006 won the appeal.[19] Voet had made various claims about the UCI and Verbruggen's behavior related to theLaurent BrochardLidocaine case at the1997 UCI Road World Championships.[20]
In 2006, according to Cycling News, the UCI contactedGreg LeMond after an interview he did in 2006 withL'Equipe, and threatened to sue him for defamation. LeMond mentioned the UCI-commissioned Vrijman report, as well asOperacion Puerto, and called the body "corrupt".[16]
Another lawsuit was byHein Verbruggen againstWADA Chief Dick Pound in Swiss court regarding his comments about doping and the UCI.[21] The lawsuit was settled by the parties in 2009.[22]
In 2011, the UCI suedFloyd Landis in Switzerland after Landis accused the body of several misdeeds, including the aforementioned alleged coverup involvingLance Armstrong and the 2001Tour de Suisse. In 2012 Cycling News reported that a District Court had ruled for the UCI against Landis.[23]
In 2012 UCI presidentPat McQuaid and former presidentHein Verbruggen, as well as the UCI itself, sued journalistPaul Kimmage in Switzerland fordefamation. In 2013, the President of Cycling Federation of Russia called the UCI Ethics Committee to investigatePat McQuaid actions after the UCI Licence Commission denied team Katusha a place in the 2013 WorldTour – the action which was promptly reversed.[24] Kimmage had been a racer and had a long history of investigating doping in the sport, including a book and, more recent to the suit, articles for theSunday Times andL'Equipe which discussed doping and the UCI.[25] Greg LeMond,[26]David Walsh and others voiced their support for Kimmage and a legal defense fund was set up to assist him.[27][28][29]
Under approval of the UCI, theFree Rate Downhill Race took place in May 2015 onCrimea,[30] an internationally recognisedUkrainian territory that was annexed by theRussian Federation in March 2014. By officially overseeing an international competition with Russian license on the Ukrainian peninsula, the UCI was the first and only internationalsports governing body which undermined theterritorial integrity of Ukraine. Yet, in the aftermath of this "scandal of sports and international law"[31] the UCI negotiated with the Cycling Federation of Ukraine and, in November 2015, announced to remove theFree Rate Downhill Race officially from the UCI international calendar.[32]
Turkmenistan's authoritarian leaderGurbanguly Berdimuhamedow was awarded the highest award of the Union Cycliste Internationale for his country's commitment to the sport.[33][34]
The UCI organizes theRoad World Championships (road race first held in 1921, time trial first held in 1994), as well as administers the premier tierUCI World Tour and second tierUCI ProSeries races. The highest level teams in men's road cycling are theUCI WorldTeam, who are obliged to take part in all UCI World Tour races.
On top of having organized the Road World Championships since 1921, from 1989 until 2004, the UCI administered theUCI Road World Cup, a season-long competition incorporating all the major one-day professional road races. In 2005 this was replaced by theUCI ProTour series which initially included theGrand Tour road cycling stage races (theTour de France,Giro d'Italia andVuelta a España) and a wider range of other one-day and stage races. However, the three Grand Tour races withdrew from the series, and in July 2008 all the major professional teams threatened to quit the series, putting its future in doubt.[35] The ProTour was replaced as a ranking system the following year by theUCI World Ranking, which added the threeGrand Tours, two early season stage races, and five more one-dayclassics to the 14 remaining ProTour events. The World Ranking and ProTour merged in 2011, becoming the UCI World Tour.
To expand the participation and popularity of professionalroad bicycle racing throughout the globe, the UCI develop a series of races collectively known as theUCI Continental Circuits for each region of the world.
The UCI organizes theRoad World Championships (road race first held in 1959, time trial first held in 1994), as well as administers the premier tierUCI Women's World Tour races. The highest level teams in women's road cycling are theUCI Women's WorldTeams, who are invited to all UCI World Tour races.
Between 1998 and 2015, theUCI Women's Road World Cup served as a season-long competition of elite-level one-day events. From 2016, the competition was replaced by the UCI Women's World Tour - which includes stage stages as well as one-day events, including many races used in the World Cup.
TheUCI Track Cycling World Championships for men and women offers individual and team championships in severaltrack cycling disciplines. TheUCI Track Cycling World Cup serves as a season-long competition of elite-level.
TheUCI Para-cycling Track World Championships for men and women offers individual and team championships in severaltrack cycling disciplines.
The UCI organizes theUCI Cyclo-cross World Cup which is a season long competition consisting of a series of one-day races in different countries. In addition, each year UCI holds theUCI Cyclo-cross World Championships to determine the world champions for various age categories. UCI also publishes the UCI cyclo-cross ranking for riders.
Inmountain bike racing, theUCI Mountain Bike & Trials World Championships is the most important and prestigious competition each year. This includes the disciplines ofcross-country anddownhill. In addition, this event consists of world championship events forbike trials riding. In 2012 the firstcross-country eliminator world championship was held in Saalfelden.[36]
The UCIMountain Bike World Cup is a series of races, held annually since 1991.
At the 2011 World Championships held in Champéry, Switzerland the UCI announced a controversial new sponsorship deal with the previously unheard of RockyRoads Network.[37]
Since 2024, the UCI has organizedUCI Snow Bike World Championships for the discipline ofsnow biking which is a type ofmountain bike racing on analpine skiing course.[38]
The season-long competition is known as the UCI BMX Supercross World Cup and theUCI BMX World Championships serves as the one-day world championships forBMX racing (bicycle motocross) cycling.
Unlike other types of cycling disciplines, trials is a sport where the main factors are the stability and the control of the bike in extreme situations where speed also plays an important role.
The firstUCI Trials World Championships took place in 1986.[39] Fourteen years later, in 2000, the UCI Trials World Cup made its debut.[40] The most World Champions titles have been won by riders from Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. The UCI Trials World Youth Games is the most important international event for boys and girls under 16 years old, the first edition of which took place in 2000.[41]
The UCI sponsors world championships forartistic cycling andcycle ball at an annual event known as theUCI Indoor Cycling World Championships.
Since 2022, the UCI started sponsoringGravel cycling events, holding the firstUCI Gravel World Championships.
It was announced that in the UCI Cycling World Championships 2027 event lineup, theGrass Bike Polo World Championship will be included.[42] Grass Bike Polo, which was an exhibition sport at the 1908 London Olympic Games, is not to be confused withHardcourt Bike Polo, which holds independent global competitions.
The nationalfederations formconfederations bycontinent:
the International Cycling Union (UCI, in French)
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