UCI Boss Wants Smaller Teams, Budget Caps to End Tour Domination

Many of the very best editions of the Tour de France have been completely unpredictable; nothing kills the suspense like a dominant rider with a dominant team. For drama, think 1987. Think 1989. Think 2011.

Viewers want the final outcome to be up in the air as long as possible, keeping the mystery going well into the third week.

In recent years Tadej Pogačar’s UAE Emirates-XRG and Jonas Vinegaard’s Visma-Lease a Bike have been the predominant teams in the years their leaders won the race. Before them it was Team Sky during the Bradley Wiggins/Chris Froome/Geraint Thomas/Egan Bernal era.

The growth of other super teams should in theory help. Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Lidl-Trek and Decathlon CMA CGM have all seen their budgets soar in recent years but, heading into this year’s Tour de France, Pogačar’s UAE squad could be shaping up to dominate the race again.

The Slovenian is the race favorite, Isaac Del Toro won the Tour Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes and is growing stronger and stronger, and they will be backed by an array of powerful teammates.

UCI president David Lappartient doesn’t single out it or any other team specifically but is concerned by super squads having a stranglehold on the race.

And that’s why he suggests a significant rethink on the composition of the Tour lineup.

“Is it really wise to limit the number of teams in the Tour de France to 22 or 23, each with eight riders?” he asked in an interview with Discovery.

“That way, the strongest teams manage to completely dominate a 3,500-kilometer race.”

His suggestion? Make it much more difficult for one or more mega-squads to monopolize the action.

“With 25 teams of six riders each, the race becomes less predictable and decidedly more spectacular.”

Stopping a skew towards super squads

Lappartient’s argument has been made before by others and, indeed, was one of the reasons why teams went from nine to eight riders in grand tours.

Cutting that number again would almost certainly have an effect, forcing the top names to have an increasing reliance on strategy rather than brute force, and to perhaps also delay any bid to seize the maillot jaune.

But Lappartient doesn’t want to stop there. The giant teams have huge budgets, enabling them to secure the services of both the star riders and also domestiques that could otherwise be leaders on other squads.

That was one argument why Team Sky was so dominant ten or more years ago.

The UCI president has argued before for salary caps and does so once again,

“To keep the sport attractive and balanced, it’s essential to prevent the best riders from all ending up on the same team,” said Lappartient.

Is the time now right?

The idea of salary caps is not a new one.

Lappartient and the UCI already tried to introduce such a measure in the past, but he revealed last November that it had been rejected. Now he hopes to reopen such discussions.

“The budget cap system was ready for implementation, but at the time the teams spoke out against it,” he said.

“We were very surprised that it was precisely the smaller teams that voted against it. Without a budget cap, the richest teams will continue to increase their revenues, making it even harder for smaller teams to survive.”

By way of example he pointed to the Arkéa-B&B Hotels team. He said he spoke to the president of the Arkéa company, who had to keep putting in more money year after year, only to see the results dwindle.

That company withdrew its sponsorship and the team stopped.

With other squads still needing to spend more and more just to keep up, he is hoping that the sentiment in the sport is better positioned now to accept such a cap.

If so, he believes the previous efforts will make things easier to pursue.

“Although the final mechanism still needs to be defined, the work done two years ago provides an excellent foundation.”

Could it happen? Would it work?

Another Tour dominance by UAE Emirates-XRG and the mood may finally be right to radically reinvent the sport.