Astana are free to race but should keep champagne on ice

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2014/dec/11/astana-cycling-worldtour-licence-uci-doping

Version 0 of 1.

It’s an old adage, but the picture was worth many words. Tweeted on Wednesday night by a French journalist, the snapshot of riders and staff from the Tour de France winner Vincenzo Nibali’s Astana team quaffing champagne at their training camp in Calpe in the wake of the decision to award the team a WorldTour licence could say only one thing: we have won.

That unofficial image and the official press release that preceded it stating the team were “happy and proud” to be awarded the licence in spite of a spate of positive drug tests and dramatic press revelations at the start of the week, were guaranteed to rile cycling fans. Hence a reaction on Twitter that varied from the cynical to the resigned to the vehement; feelings ran most strongly in the brief gap between Astana putting out their press release and the UCI releasing a full explanation of the ruling.

What the UCI made clear was that while Nibali’s team are free to race, it is conditional. “On probation,” said Brian Cookson, the UCI president. That’s pretty accurate: Astana are being allowed to go about their bike-racing business for the time being while being audited and monitored. They must conform in advance to a new set of team-management guidelines to be brought in for 2017 which are intended to make teams far more answerable for their riders. There is a February deadline. Astana must pay for the audit. And there is the proviso that it is back to square one if anything else substantive – such as another positive test – is added to the charge sheet.

There can’t be a great deal in that for Astana to be “happy and proud” about. The combination of audit, monitoring and final warning adds up to the strictest level of scrutiny I can recall being placed on any cycling team. That may reflect poorly on the UCI’s desire to bring teams into line in the past 15 years but it is also a reminder of the practical difficulties of bunging teams out of the sport on ethical grounds.

Ruling that a rider is positive and is banned is relatively simple; ruling that a team is ethically unsound is more complex. You can’t just say it looks that way. It has to be legally watertight, whether that flies in the face of public opinion or not. In Astana’s case three positive tests – the ones taken into account in the ruling were the two at the WorldTour team and one for a rider on trial there – plus the various background elements were not sufficient to guarantee that the ruling would survive a trip to the court of arbitration for sport, which would have been inevitable had the licence commission downgraded Astana from WorldTour.

Legally, the thinking would be that the only substantive change since last year’s successful application – when the team’s head, Alexandr Vinokourov, was still an unrepentant doper who had worked with Lance Armstrong’s former trainer Michele Ferrari – consisted of the three positive tests. There is no precedent for positive tests being viewed as grounds for a licence being refused. The UCI had its fingers burnt last year in the case against Katusha and cannot have wanted to take the risk a second time.

There remains the weighty matter of the Padua inquiry into alleged doping, illegal payments and tax evasion in cycling. It’s a vast inquiry centred on Ferrari, who has twice denied any connection to Astana this week in statements on his website, and drawing in many Italian and East European cyclists. Nibali is not among them. Much of the alleged content was made public in La Gazzetta dello Sport this week. But if a ruling is to have legal weight, it can’t be made on the basis of leaks to newspapers.

Critically the documentation from Padua had not arrived at the UCI in time for the ruling. They could have waited but as always when legal cases interact with sport the time frame will be uncertain, what with obtaining the documents, translating them, then acquiring a legal interpretation. Delaying the ruling would have drawn the charge of prevarication and created uncertainty for race organisers with the season only a few weeks away. As it is, Astana have been put very much on the spot and the ruling will be revisited if Padua throws up anything substantive; for example, any indication that Astana worked systematically with Dr Ferrari could prove fatal to the team.

For the UCI the hardest part is yet to come. A framework now appears to be in place within which Astana can be monitored and scrutinised – and which can be used against other teams in future if need be – and the door is wide open for further action, but the need to follow through is paramount. For Nibali, meetings with the press are going to become more tense as, even if there are no doubts over his probity, he will face questions over his team and its management. For Astana, the champagne might have been better kept in the cellar.