UCI vote decides future of McQuaid

This afternoon in the Italian city of Florence, UCI Congress will sit down in the Palazzo Vecchio with the future of world cycling at stake.

By lunchtime, the votes of 42 delegates will have been cast to decide who will run world cycling’s governing body over the next four years.

Pat McQuaid, the Irish incumbent who has ran the federation for eight years is seeking a third term, while Brian Cookson, British Cycling’s long-time president, is positioning himself as an agent of change.

The campaign has seen much mud-slinging played out in public with the tit-for-tat nature of the exchanges making it one of the hardest elections to call in recent times.

It continued yesterday. A memo from UCI general director Christophe Hubschmid, a close ally of McQuaid’s, was sent to all management committee members saying that the presidential candidates would not be allowed any “backdrop” while their speeches are taking place.

“No ‘backdrop’ may be used by candidates during their speech. During each candidate’s speech, his name will be displayed on the big screen,” the memo read. Cookson had used PowerPoint and slides to great effect in his presentation to the European members in Zurich earlier this month, when he won a crushing victory over McQuaid.

It’s hard to argue with McQuaid’s assessment that the campaign has been “a fairly bitter one not based on manifestos and sporting promise or desires, but on personalities, and there has been interference in the campaign from other sources that has reduced it to a very vitriolic type campaign”.

However, the Dubliner is going into today’s vote still confident of achieving victory.

“I’m still confident I’ll be reelected,” McQuaid declared during the week.

“You don’t know what sort of manoeuvres are going to happen but I’m still confident, from the people I’ve been speaking with, that I have the numbers to be reelected. But then again, my opposition has played dirty tricks up to now and goodness knows what they’re capable of doing.”

The “dirty tricks” McQuaid eludes to is something that some cycling fans will find very difficult to digest, given that he has effectively tried to change the rules midway through the election campaign to aid him in getting a nomination.

Today’s election showdown follows a motion by the Malaysian Cycling federation to amend the constitution of the UCI which sought to allow any two federations nominate a candidate for the presidency, as well as extending the 90-day deadlines for nominations to August 30. This made McQuaid’s belated backing from the Moroccan and Thai federations valid, since he didn’t receive a nomination from Ireland (after a decision to back him in the original vote was withdrawn on a technicality) and the Swiss revoked their backing of him.

The timing and convenience of that move drew as much suspicion as anger. McQuaid, though, has remained steadfast in his belief that no rules have been broken, and says that motion still has to be passed today, before he can even stand for election.

Last month he told the Irish Examiner he would “hammer” Cookson if he got to Florence but if he loses today’s vote, he will accept the outcome.

“I’ll walk away and say he won an election and that’s it, and I’ll be happy to walk away and do some consultancy. I’ve got plenty of contacts; I could earn a lot more money outside of the UCI than I do inside the UCI so I’d be quite happy to go on and work with different people that I know that want to develop cycling within their nations.

“If I win, it depends on whether he then gets elected on the management committee because he’s also going for a position there. If he’s on the management committee then it would be important that he would have a role on a commission. If he’s not on the management committee, that wouldn’t be so important.”