David Lappartient said that the UCI will consider budget caps and smaller team sizes.GETTY IMAGES
Int'l Cycling Union (UCI) President David Lappartient will "investigate a raft of measures to break Team Sky's dominance," including budget caps and smaller team sizes, according to Lawrence Ostlere of the London INDEPENDENT. Geraint Thomas’ Tour de France triumph was Sky’s sixth in the past seven years dating back to Bradley Wiggins’ success in '12, and meant Sky has "won all of the past four grand tours." While Thomas’ victory "garnered national interest in Britain," most traditional cycling nations around Europe reported a "decrease in TV viewing figures, with fans complaining that many stages were boring and predictable." Lappartient: "Something needs to change. We will create a working group to look at the attractiveness of professional races. The goal is to have the best riders in different teams and so limiting the overall budget would mean better riders and a more attractive race." Sky has an estimated budget of around £30M ($39.4M), believed to be "substantially more" than any other team and almost as much as the UCI. Lappartient said, "I'm against an individual salary cap. If a team wants to pay a rider €8M ($9.3M), that's not a problem, but I think we could regulate the overall payroll budget of the teams to balance their strengths" (INDEPENDENT, 8/1). In Paris, David Opoczynski reported Lappartient said, "The salary cap is an intermediate goal. The idea is that we can have good cyclists on each team, that we do not have a concentration of means on a single team and we make sure that we have leaders on each team and that the race is more interesting. That's the goal." Tour de France Dir Christian Prudhomme said, "We want more suspense." Lappartient: "It's fair to say, 'If a team is able to buy the top 10 riders in the world, then there will be less interest in the sport.' The global salary cap does not prohibit paying a very expensive athlete, but in this case it will be necessary to be regulated with the rest of the field. That's it, then it is a team strategy" (LE PARISIEN, 8/1).
