Depressing as this is (that it’s taken so long, to clarify), I think these are largely wider societal problems and not specific to cycling. Has the UCI done much about them? Absolutely not. Has it been responsible for them? Also not.
There are very few openly gay professional athletes in any major sport, and in Europe at least, black athletes are under-represented outside football and athletics. There are still, regrettably, largely swathes of society here in the UK that are both homophobic and racist. While overt discrimination and violence is pleasingly much more rare than it was, and the UK’s major sport, football, is fairly hot on punishing overt racists, discrimination is practised much more subtly. I also suspect that the culture of many team sports is fairly homophobic, and snide locker-room or on-pitch comments go largely unpunished and potentially create an unwelcoming environment (to put it mildly).
I don’t agree.
Basketball, handball, rugby, judo, to name but a few, have large POC representation. Not to mention other ethnicities.
Completely agree on homophobia though, and even latent racism is present in most sports.
I thnk there’s a societal problem, but where you see most corporations at least pay lip-service to “social justice”, most sports federation don’t even pretend to give a rat’s arse about fighting discrimination.
“This email was not sent to any women, that is for sure. Until this point, women, and the women’s peloton, have had no say or input regarding these new [safety] rules that were passed.”
Guess we now know the uci views female cyclists only as amateurs.
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I look forward to following Justin Williams’ lead and trying my best to NOT give the uci any of my money.
Sexual harassment, found guilty. He should have been banned from cycling.
“I know who those anonymous riders are in that open letter. They are angry because I sent them off because they were not performing. To camouflage their own failures they turn me into a piss pole, a fat bag. And as a man you are powerless. My only mistake? To repeatedly point out to them that they were far too fat. "
No offense y’all, but you all are surprised that a HUGE source of profits has corruption?
This exists ANYWHERE there is money. EVERY major sports league. Literally, my coworkers were just talking about how football players can get away with anything as long as they are good players, and they are all football fans.
Any government is going to have have corruption. Country, corporation, any organization. It is human nature to be power hungry, which is why we have TR. We aren’t going for 5w/kg because we want to be healthy. We want the power.
From the articles, I gather that many instances of sexual harassment happened. Did you read the links? Formal complaints from three athletes, UCI ruled guilty, gave him a retroactive ban so effectively only one year.
I did. What I saw was 10 allegations of abuse, with 3 formally lodged.
The only mention I saw of specifics I saw ANYWHERE was one slap. Which mind you I am not discounting at all…I’d be hard pressed to come up with a scenario where that was within an order of magnitude of being justified. But I also don’t think that in and of itself is justifying the level of outrage I’m seeing.
So either I am obviously missing some crucial information and am ignorant of the situation (completely plausible…) or people are making a whole lot of hard damning statements based on the wishy-washiest of facts. That’s not to say the guy did nothing wrong, or even didnt do something horrifically wrong. My question simply is: do we know what the guy did? Seems like an important first question…
It’s actually irrelevant. 10 women complained and the investigation found him guilty. That’s all we need to know. The debate is the sentence—people are upset that harassment in any form is tolerated to the extent that he would be allowed back into a managerial role in the future.
Presuming this is ironic, but one of the fascinating things about the big-name sports is that there’s little question that PED use is happening. As @ABG pointed out, the players’ unions for those sports set strict limits on how, when, and for what testing can be done. Contrast that with the testing regime that applies to pro cycling, and other “olympic” sports where anti-doping reps can show up randomly for out-of-competition testing, etc… and still positive tests are extremely rare. This was the case during the heyday of doping in the 80’s to 00’s and there’s no reason to think things are any different today.
There’s a lot of evidence of doping at the top levels of international soccer/football. Same with baseball and American football. The monetary stakes are soo much higher than with cycling, the benefits are just as great, and the chance of being caught significantly lower.
What he was found guilty of is irrelevant? “Abuse” can cover anything from taking a parking spot that one time, to murder. I think specifics matter.
For the record, I’m inclined to agree with the sentiment in this thread that something pretty nasty happened, and the sentence was too lenient. But people are putting the cart way, way in front of the horse IMO.
