Note: if you don’t want to read the whole article, scroll down to the last graph.

After my initial blog posts about the bio passport, there have been some interesting follow-ups from the UCI, Velocast, Cyclingnews and others. This is what the UCI data looks like for the total number of biological passport tests compared to what was originally suggested by Anne Gripper at the ANADO workshop:

Number of Biological Passport total tests vs "ANADO target"

So the achieved number of tests is 70-90% of the original target. Not great, but I’m willing to cut the UCI some slack as it is hard to predict at the start of a completely new project how things will progress and what is exactly needed.

However, it’s important to realize there are two types of tests in the biological passport; urine and blood. Each are used to detect different forms of doping, obviously the blood tests are pretty important to reveal various types of blood boosting).

Urine and blood tests each have their individual targets, which for blood tests is 8720 tests per year (source: ANADO). The number of performed tests is lower (source: UCI). In a graph it looks like this:

Number of Biological Passport blood tests vs "ANADO target"

This shortfall is much more dramatic. But that’s not all. Remember that in the UCI’s response to my original “misleading, irresponsible, mischievous” blog, they provided data about the number of blood tests carried out. Let’s add that data to the chart, but before I do please note:

• The data in their press release referred to broken years, so I calculated the tests per month to better compare. It’s not perfect as some periods may legitimately see a bit less testing than others, but that effect should be small as out-of-competition testing is a big part of the program.
• The UCI provided numbers for July-Dec 2010 but excluding the Tour, so covering more than 5 but less than 6 months. I have calculated as if they cover 5 months, so the true Aug-Dec 2010 number is slightly worse than indicated in the graph.

We’ve looked at the practical possibilities of minimum wages for women in cycling, but how about the moral aspect. Should men and women have equal minimum wages in pro cycling? Sounds fair enough, doesn’t it? So it won’t surprised you that – unreasonable as I am – I’ll answer that with a big NO (and a small yes).

Let’s start with the small yes. I would agree that in their role as ATHLETES, they should be treated equally. If you get money just for being an athlete, you should get the same money regardless if you’re a male or female. For example, if you get money from your national olympic committee to prepare for London 2012 (as many athletes do), your gender shouldn’t matter.

In the same vain, it shouldn’t matter if you’re a rower, a ping pong player or a cyclist; if your country decides to spend tax dollars on sports in order to win medals at the olympics, it stands to reason you support all these athletes the same (if they pass the same criteria).

I don’t pretend to know all the Olympic programs in the world, but it is my impression that most national olympic committees work in this manner. Great, fantastic, equality achieved. But what the heck does this have to do with professional sports? I would argue: absolutely nothing.

Professional athletes aren’t paid to be athletes, they are paid in an economic transaction where the paying side receives a benefit that is hopefully bigger than the salary paid. The benefit could be in the form of direct revenue (ticket sales,merchandise) or indirect revenue (logo exposure or public appearances for a sponsor leading to a revenue increase for said sponsor). It has nothing to do with equality, it’s unequal in every way imaginable because it’s a simple economic transaction. A rower makes less money than a soccer player, a soccer player at Barcelona makes more than at Sporting Riga, per definition everybody gets compensated in line with the value they offer.

In some cases, a female athlete makes more than her male counterparts (I’m pretty sure the best-paid triathlete in the UK is a woman), unfortunately that’s rare. But in all cases, discussions about what people deserve are moot. Nobody deserves to be a professional athlete, there is no God-given right to turn your hobby into your job and get paid for it. It’s a privilege to find a company willing to support you to make that switch a reality. In fact, it’s also a privilege to have the tax payer support you to win some medals (or fail miserably) at the next olympics.

However, leaving it at that would be unfair to women sports. Although it is my strong belief that you cannot force sponsors to support athletes without an economic return (they will simply leave and sponsor golf or sailing instead), the same cannot be said for our sports federations.

We’ll cover that tomorrow, , so check back here or just subscribe.

Andrew P asked this question and I thought the answer warranted a new blog post:

Garmin Cervelo womens team were a UK registered team, no? UCI contract “suggests” that the team pay one of the following:

“This pay may not be less than the following amount:
(Choose one)
– The legal minimum wage of the country of the nationality of the UCI Team;
– The amount set by (name of NF) in its national regulations;
– The minimum wage negotiated by (name of NF) with (e.g. name of riders’ union) of the country”

Seems anomalous that GC team’s minimum wage rates set below the UK NMW limit.

For starters, I made a mistake in my write-up. So thanks for pointing that out, I have corrected it. The UK minimum wage when I calculated it last year came to 14,600 Euro, not 19,600 I have corrected the numbers in the blog now. It should also be noted that neo-pros are usually young, and different minimum wages apply to younger people in most countries (including the UK).

This also highlights another problem, which is exchange rates. The UCI rules reference the minimum wage of the registering federation (UK in our case) but obviously a rider living in Spain or the Netherlands wants to be paid in Euros, not GBP. And the team has no real choice in where to register, it is based on its roster (or it would have to hire some fake riders in a specific country, which is not unheard of).

Secondly, as Andrew indicated, the UCI nor most national federations mandate a minimum wage for women or continental riders, they merely “suggest” one. This is again different than for Pro Conti and WorldTour riders, where the minimum wage is mandatory.

Thirdly, even if the “suggestion” was enforced, not all riders on a continental or women’s team are considered “professional” by UCI rule standards. Article 2.17.004 states:

A continental or women’s team will comprise riders who may or may not be professional, in the elite and/or under 23 men’s categories for a continental team and elite women’s category for a wom- en’s team. It must have between 8 and 16 riders.

So you can have a continental or women’s team where nobody gets paid a salary. This is not necessarily a problem, if people want to race at that level, don’t want or need a salary, then they’re free to register and compete with other Continental teams and sometimes with Pro Conti teams. Most women riders do get paid, but the amount is below the minimum wage suggestion.

As it stands now, this is not a problem because it’s merely a suggestion, and even if it became mandatory, those women below the threshold would probably become “amateurs with some compensation”.

Fourthly, there are no definitions of full-time and part-time in the UCI rules. We compensate all riders on the basis of 12 months, and the analysis I showed before was based on what minimum wages look like for 40 hours onbut that doesn’t mean they are “locked-in” for those 12 months. Quite a few women riders study or work in parallel with their cycling career. Of course some do so because they have no choice given the salary they make riding, but for many it’s also a more cerebral choice.

For example, we have a rider who had a very good job at a major multinational before she focussed more on racing. She races the full season, but then in the Fall/Winter she has a few months to do projects for her old employer or some other companies. It keeps the door open for life after racing, and of course it supplements her income too. Similarly, we have a rider who is working on her PhD in the off-season.

Finally, which country applies? The UCI rules suggest to look at the country of registration, and certainly for the federation rules which need to be followed that makes sense. But for a legal discussion regarding minimum wage, it makes a lot less sense. For example, other than the registration at the British federation, Garmin-Cervelo has no ties with the UK. It’s not a UK company, virtually none of its races are there, virtually none of its riders live there.

In fact, for the national authorities (not the cycling authorities, but actual labor and tax authorities), the country of registration of the team is completely irrelevant. They look at where the employer and employee are based. If you are a UCI team registered in Spain and you pay a rider living in Switzerland a wage that is above the UCI minimum, above the Spanish minimum but below the Swiss minimum, you’ve got a problem (I’m simplifying a bit, it depends on self-employed vs employed, etc, but safe to say, it’s complicated).

Men’s cycling has a minimum a minumum wage, but it’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Let’s take a look:

First off, there are several minimum wages for men. There is the minimum wage for riders of WorldTour teams (33,000 Euro), there is the minimum wage for Continental Pro teams (27,500 Euro) and then there are the Continental teams. For the latter, minimum wage is zero (which is probably one of the reason it’s zero for the women too, since many of the women’s regulations are based on Continental team rules).

On top of this, WorldTour and Pro Conti teams have separate minimum wages for neo-pros (26,700 and 23,000 Euro respectively). In case the rider is self-employed rather than directly employed by the paying agent, the minimum is 150% of the above (as the rider now has to pay his own social charges, etc).

If you make the minimum wage the same for women as it is for the WorldTour or Pro Conti, there would be no women’s teams left. It simply wouldn’t be viable at all, the disconnect between the exposure and the payroll would be completely out of whack. It’s already difficult – rightfully or wrongfully – to justify a women’s team for many organizations now. Doubling, trebling or tenfolding the payroll is not going to help the sport, it would kill it.

To put it bluntly, there are women’s teams with very small budget where the total payroll is about equal to the minimum wage of one WorldTour rider. And that’s not because the manager pockets all the money and is getting rich. Everybody on such teams is doing it for the love of the sport and happy to get a few Euros in compensation.

Therefore, to me asking for a minimum wage to be mandatory in women’s cycling is the backward approach. It won’t magically increase the budgets of the teams who currently can’t afford a minimum wage, it will simply shutter them. The only viable approach is to get the budgets up, and once they are up, you can start to set minimum wages. At that point it’s basically wealth redistribution, with the top rider salaries being blunted a little in favor of the domestiques.

But, you may argue, that’s an awfully practical approach. How about the principle that men and women riders should be treated equally? To see the sparks fly tomorrow, subscribe here.

Pat McQuaid was asked about a minimum wage for women riders, and said he didn’t think the sport had the level yet. Vos, Teutenberg, Bronzini and others took offense and were said to support the idea for a minimum wage. So this seems to be as good a time as any to delve into this issue.

As you may know, the Garmin-Cervelo women’s team has a minimum wage (and I believe it’s the only team to have one). The decision to do this was easy, the implementation not so easy. What should it be? With a  Dutch rider living in Spain riding for an American team registered in the UK, there’s no shortage of rates you can pick. And do you make it a true full-time wage that you can expect people to live off? Or is that simply not possible with the economics of women cycling? The countries that were most relevant to our team were as follows (using wikipedia and recalculating from International dollars to Euros):

• UK: 14,600 Euro
• Netherlands: 16,800 Euro
• Spain: 9,000 Euro
• USA: 13,000 Euro

As you can see, that’s quite a spread. To keep it easy, we went with 18,000 Euro (1500/mo) as the standard minimum wage on the team. We then made an exception for the minimum wage for neo-pros, which we put at 12,000 Euro (1000/mo). We felt this was necessary as a principle, to ensure fast flow through of young riders to the highest level. In men’s cycling, neo-pros also have a lower minimum salaries. And we figured that over time, we could raise the minimum wage level, while it would be hard to go the other way round.

It’s by no means a get-rich-quick scheme, but it’s a start and better than having riders race a whole season for free, as it still the case for about a quarter of the women’s peloton (this is a pretty rough estimate of questionable origin, but it sounds about right. If I were a journalist, I wouldn’t have mentioned it).

Tomorrow we’ll see how it all compares to the men, so if you don’t want to miss that, subscribe here.

NOTE Oct 5, 2011 – I corrected the UK minimum wage, I had typed 19,600 Euro, this should have been 14,600 Euro. Thanks to Andrew P for pointing out the error

Tim DeWaele was the first to publish photos of Mark Cavendish in his HTC rainbow jersey (more of Tim’s Cavendish photos here):

This jersey appears to violate the UCI regulations regarding the rainbow jersey in at least seven areas:

• The advertising on the front and back of the jersey has to fit in a box 10cm high (with the exception of the apparel manufacturer’s logo, MOA in this case). Obviously the Specialized S does not fit in a 10cm high box together with Highroad.
• The Lezyne logo at the bottom is not allowed. Maybe he can tuck in his jersey inside his bibs, that would solve this particular problem (though maybe not entirely “pro”).
• Logos on the side of the jersey are not allowed
• Logo on the chest should be UCI logo, not WorldTour logo
• UCI logo should be on the right chest, not the left
• The logos on the rainbow stripes on the collar must be the UCI logos, not the sponsor logos.
• The rainbow stripes on the sleeves need to be at least 35mm from the edge of the sleeve. I never understood this rule, in the old days the rainbow stripes WERE the edge of the jersey and that looked way nicer, but I digress.

Before you even produce a jersey, you need to submit it for approval to the UCI. So what happened here? Did the UCI approve a jersey that completely violates their rules, did MOA produce without submitting the design, did they make this one for the sponsors without intention to race in it?

The latter wouldn’t necessarily get them off the hook because the UCI claims to own the rainbow stripes, so making anything with those requires their permission. I have to add, the UCI has been very weak in defending their design for years (witness the rainbow as part of the Colnago logo and the Ritchey WCS series for example).

In fact, even approval from the UCI doesn’t explicitly get you off the hook. The rules state that a fine is due if the sponsor logo dimensions don’t meet the requirements, they do not state that a design approval frees you from that threat. Of course you’d have a pretty strong case, but still.

We’ll see where this goes. And don’t think we’re talking chump change here. The MINIMUM fine for producing an incorrect rainbow jersey is CHF 10,000 per event!