As the most profitable race promoter in pro cycling, Amaury Sport Organisation wants to dictate how the sport is run.

That’s why for the past three years ASO and its surrogates have resisted substantive changes in cycling, particularly those changes involving the elite-level ProTour, which all other parties have embraced. ASO’s insurgency has now come to a head in its bid to independently promote next week’s Paris-Nice. And it appears that this time it has made one step too many.

The Paris-based ASO — part of Groupe Amaury, a media empire that publishes the most profitable French newspapers, including sports daily L’Équipe — has expanded considerably in recent years. Until the early-1990s, the company’s core properties were the Tour de France, Paris-Roubaix and Paris-Tours, along with smaller French races like the Critérium International, Tour de l’Oise (now called the Tour de Picardie) and Tour de l’Avenir. ASO has since taken over several major events, including the Belgian classics Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Fleche Wallonne, and the weeklong Paris-Nice stage race, which ASO bought at a fire-sale price from interim owner Laurent Fignon in 2002.

In order to promote the 2008 Paris-Nice as an independent race ASO bosses Patrice Clerc and Christian Prudhomme metaphorically twisted the arm of Jean Pitallier, the president of the French cycling federation, to obtain a domestic race sanction for the March 9-17 race. And it apparently badgered Eric Boyer, the recently elected president of the pro teams organization AIGCP (Association Internationale des Groupes Cyclistes Professionels), in an attempt to persuade the 20 invited teams to sign a contract that essentially deprives them of the rights, rules and due process that have taken the world’s cycling family many years to formulate through its regulatory body, the Union Cycliste Internationale.

The French Federation's decision to back ASO clearly does not have the full support of other national governing bodies. On Sunday, the European Cycling Union passed a resolution condemning the ASO, FFC actions regarding Paris-Nice by a vote of 18-7.

UCI president Pat McQuaid, who speaks for all of the world’s affiliated cycling federations, has had no choice except to condemn ASO’s defiant position. Speaking Thursday night from Dubai, where he was attending the Arab Cycling Championships, McQuaid told VeloNews that ASO’s proposals for Paris-Nice show it has “lost all respect for cyclists, teams, the UCI and the sport of cycling.”

Upon his return to Europe, McQuaid is due to meet with Boyer, probably on Tuesday, to discuss the situation — particularly in view of the fact that many teams do not agree with Boyer’s statement last Wednesday that the teams unanimously accepted the ASO contract.

It has been reported that the current situation is similar to last year’s when ASO also threatened to organize Paris-Nice under the auspices of the French cycling federation. But the situation was different in 2007. ASO was then protesting the decision to make Paris-Nice part of the UCI ProTour, which entailed inviting all the ProTour teams, including Unibet.com — a team that ASO claimed could not operate in France because of a long-forgotten law banning competition for French off-site betting operations from overseas companies, like the Swedish-owned Unibet. The UCI agreed to a compromise that saw the event raced under UCI rules and as part of the ProTour, but without Unibet.

This year, Astana is the “Unibet” that has not been invited to Paris-Nice, which, at ASO’s request, is not part of the ProTour. ASO’s reason for triggering this latest showdown has nothing to do with the ProTour; it is an attempt to undo a decision made a month ago to include Paris-Nice on the Europe Tour calendar as an hors-classe event — like other major European races that are not part of the ProTour. But the calendar issue is perhaps secondary to the one that ASO is far more concerned about: the doping situation in cycling, and the way in which it still feels duped by the UCI over the participation of Michael Rasmussen at last year’s Tour de France and a “system” that did not catch out Alexander Vinokourov for blood doping until the Tour itself.

ASO’s goal is apparent from reading the contract that the promoter has proposed for Paris-Nice (a copy of which VeloNews has obtained), and about which several teams have expressed deep reservations. The very first article of the contract, titled “Purpose of the Contract,” states: “The parties agree that the agreement between them in regard to the fight against doping, and the consequent guarantee given by the teams, that the personnel and riders who participate in the event under its authority will observe an irreproachable comportment as regards the rules and/or recommendations dictated by the competent, relevant authorities.”

Under article 3.2 of the contract, should any teams or team members “damage the image of the event and/or the organizer,” they will be fined $45,000. Any such fines would be donated by ASO to the French cycling federation. In other words, ASO wants to run its races under its own rules, using French law, with French commissaires and French medical testers, and donate any fines to French cycling.

All of these proposals, along with many other parts of the contract, are a total rejection of the way the sport is overseen by the UCI, and is a clear violation of professional cycling’s basic principles. Rather than put Paris-Nice (and subsequently the Tour de France) under the auspices of the UCI, like every other international race around the world, ASO wants to dictate all the terms of elite competition.

As for the Europe Tour calendar decision, that was made at a meeting attended by McQuaid and the presidents of the French, Italian, Spanish, Belgian and Luxembourg cycling federations, held on January 26 in Treviso, Italy, prior to the UCI world cyclo-cross championships. After that meeting, a statement was issued that claimed to have solved the calendar problem. The presidents said that their meeting had “restored serenity to professional cycling” for years to come.

The agreed-upon plan put the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España, along with the “monumental” classics Milan-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Tour of Lombardy, on a so-called historic calendar, while Paris-Nice was put on the Europe Tour list with Tirreno-Adriatico, Flèche Wallonne and Paris-Tours. Since that meeting, it seems that the organizers of the Italian and Spanish races have registered their events with the UCI, but ASO is continuing to resist a decision that Pitallier agreed to in Treviso. After that meeting, Pitallier said, “This is an advance. We are heading toward a compromise … but there are some adjustments to be made.”

It is now clear that he was pandering to ASO, which clearly did not like the Treviso agreement and persuaded Pitallier to do an about-face and sanction Paris-Nice as a national race. Such an event would not be allowed to invite teams registered with the UCI, and certainly not 17 of the 18 ProTour teams. That is why McQuaid correctly said that teams and riders taking part in such an event would be operating outside of the UCI. Also, race organizer ASO, the French cycling federation, the teams and the riders would be subject to sanctions and penalties. The penalties could include ASO being banned from organizing another race; the French federation being sanctioned and/or fined; ProTour teams forfeiting some of their million-dollar salary deposits; and riders being excluded from the world championships or even the Olympic Games.

This latter possibility is not dissimilar to an incident that took place in 1976 at the Rapport Toer in South Africa, At the time, the South African federation was not affiliated to the UCI or the Olympic movement because of apartheid. Among the athletes who traveled to the event, and raced under assumed names, were Irish riders Sean Kelly and, yes, Pat McQuaid. The future king of the classics and the present president of the UCI were both suspended and banned from competing at the 1976 Olympics in Montréal. So anyone believing that the UCI will not invoke sanctions should the teams and riders go ahead and compete at an unsanctioned Paris-Nice need to be aware of McQuaid’s experience 32 years ago.