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It's either 7 or is it 8 years that you've been president of the UCI now? What have been
the major changes that have been implemented by yourself and the rest of the organisation
during that time. Almost coming up to 8 years next September for me it's a four year term
and the second 4 year term finishes up next September. I think the major changes are the
sport is globalised, I mean when I became president I laid out 2 main objectives and
one was the globalisation of the sport and as I said my experience in Malaysia, Philippines
and places like that from being there and seeing athletes from those countries I knew
that if they were given opportunities to ride good races we could find some very good professionals
there. So globalising the sport was one of the objectives the other was the fight against
doping, I tried to, tried to change the culture of what was doping in the sport into antidoping.
In relation to the first one globalisation I think the sport has and is still in the
process of globalising I've introduced the world tours, the UCI world tours come in,
we introduced 2 races in Canada, 1 race in Beijing onto the world tour and then we've
also got the 5 continental calendars and when I look at it in 2005 for instance Africa there
would've been maybe 4 to 5 races UCI international races in Africa on the African continent if
you look today there's 25 or 30 and I would predict that within a couple of years time
I'm going to say a couple, 6 or 7 years time there will be an African rider, probably a
black African rider on a podium of a grand tour, because the talent is there and we see
that in riders that are coming from places like Eritrea, Ethiopia, once they're given
the opportunities it can happen. Also Asia has developed rapidly it's growing very very
fast and there's a whole professional scene with continental teams, pro continental teams
and new events, very well organised events in Asia. So globalisation has gone very well
and is still going, still a lot to be done there. The other was anti doping and I firmly
believed in the biological passport, I firmly believed in what it could achieve for us,
what it could do for us and I was very instrumental on introducing the biological passport into
cycling now we see even in recent weeks many other international federations are coming
under pressure and looking at and communicating with the UCI as to how they can do introduce
it into their sport so I think from the point of view of that the armoury is around today
in the fight against doping is much stronger than the armoury that was there 15 years ago.
You talk about the globalisation of cycling helping the sport as a whole the organisers
the teams become more professional and one of the topics at the moment is the fact that
teams are so reliant on there sponsors in terms of the backing and if there main sponsor
pulls out it's very likely that teams go into fold, there's no income from TV rights or
from ticket sales again is that something that you are going to address or is that something
that the teams and the organisers need to address? No no no it's a responsibility it's
a matter for the UCI as well and in that sense I think what we've announced recently, just
before christmas, the stakeholder consultation will take a lot of that into account because
we've had a very positive response to the stakeholder consultation, all of the stake
holders in the UCI, teams, riders, organisers, fans even, national federations have all been
asked to get involved in the stake holder consolations. It's an online an online thing
so it's currently going on as we speak and a lot of those factors will be taken into
account there and I think we will use a lot of the knowledge that we get from that stake
holders consultation to try to drive the sport in a way that people think it should be driven
forward but sustainability of teams is a thing that will come in, I've no doubt as a discussion
group when we get down to working groups discussing all of the ideas that come forward and we'll
see what ideas come forward in terms of sustainability. At the moment a lot of teams are you know
sponsors come and go so we need more security for sponsors and indeed we need a more global
World Tour and with a global world tour that does mean new events in new places but that
doesn't say and a lot of people get afraid when they hear me mention or the UCI mention
something like that, they say well what about all the historic races and the tradition of
the sport. We can not afford to nor we have no intention of neglecting that history, neglecting
the heritage of cycling but what we want to do is add new events to that heritage that
can benefit the sport and benefit the development of the sport and benefit the professionalisation
of the sport and finish up with a much better television product than we have at the moment.