2013 UCI Presidential Election - was it the strangest presidential election in cycling history?

It’s the 25th Anniversary of Cycling News website and they’re running a series of articles about significant events from that period. Here is the link to the piece about the 2013 UCI Presidential Election. An interesting read, not sure I agree with everything in it. I’ll publish my own recollections of that day in a couple of days. Edit (24.12.2020); My story from that day now added below.

Outside the UCI World Cycling Centre in Aigle, Switzerland.

My recollections of one of the most momentous days in the history of cycling.

It is Friday 27th September 2013. I’m sitting on the raised platform at the end of the Salone dei Cinquecento of the Palazzio Vecchio in Florence, Italy. From here, five hundred years previously the famous Medici family ruled vast areas of Italy, having removed from office the infamous Niccolo Machiavelli, who had practised his devious statecrafts, conspiracies, and manipulations for the previous regime, the Florentine Republic.

I am surrounded by some of the most beautiful artworks of the Renaissance. Sculptures by Michelangelo, paintings by Donatello, Bronzino, and many others.  So much art that even the frescos by Da Vinci that were lost and covered over long ago, are now just a footnote in the history of this magnificent building. In fact, many years previously, as a teenager, I had actually drawn its façade as part of my A-Level Art and Architecture studies. 

I am not here today to appreciate the art or the architecture, however. I have a different mission. But then again, maybe not so different from that of the Medici family. In a way, I am trying to do something that they did. Perhaps not to overthrow a dynasty, but certainly to change a major institution. Something that, in my world, in this time, has never been done before; I am trying to challenge and overthrow a sitting president of the governing body of world cycling, the UCI, or to give it its full title l’Union Cycliste Internationale. 

In fact, so far as I can work out, no sitting president of any international sports federation has been successfully challenged and defeated for almost half a century. That isn’t how things are done in the world of sports politics. Position is power. Power is position. Challenge the status quo and you are likely to end up torn, tattered and defeated, never again to hold a significant role in your sport. 

But this time, things are different. Or they could be. Cycling’s regime is itself torn and tattered, rocked by scandal after scandal, pretty much all of them around doping, a sickness that has afflicted professional cycling’s highest levels so deeply and become so firmly entrenched that the sport’s entire credibility is in question. Things are so bad that there is even talk of excluding cycling from the Olympic Games, hardly the bastion of sporting purity itself, but nevertheless perhaps the key influence in the world of sports politics.  Whatever, one thing is clear to the world. Cycling needs change. 

That much had become abundantly clear to me a few months earlier, many thousands of kilometres away, in the somewhat more prosaic setting of the Eva Bandman Park, in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, on the banks of the Ohio River, where the annual UCI World Cyclo-Cross Championships were being held. When the incumbent UCI President, Pat McQuaid, stepped onto the podium to present the medals and the UCI’s unique rainbow jersey to the champion of the Elite Men’s event, Sven Nijs of Belgium, the crowd had booed and jeered. Not because they had any disrespect for the rider, the acknowledged king of that discipline at the time. No, it was clear what the cycling fans of the USA and the many spectators from around the world thought about the way the UCI was being lead. 

So yes, cycling needed change, world cycling’s governing body needed to change, and that had to start from the top. To be frank, I really had never wanted to be the President of the UCI. I was happy with my professional career outside of cycling and my role as President of British Cycling where, over seventeen years, I had lead the transformation of the organisation from a basket case to a thriving and successful award-winning governing body. 

But after that experience in Louisville, after difficult, painful meetings of the UCI Management Committee and after it had become clear that McQuaid did not have the will to make the necessary changes or indeed the support of many of our colleagues, I had decided to act. 

After final discussions with some of those colleagues, it had become clear that the only possible challengers would be myself or David Lappartient, the President of the Federation Francais de Cyclisme, and the European Cycling Union. I had telephoned Lappartient and we had discussed the situation. We had agreed that only one of us should stand or we risked splitting the vote. Lappartient had asked me to allow him a few hours to consider the matter, to talk to his wife and to come back to me. When he did, he had told me that it was not right for him at that stage in his life. So it was then clear, if the UCI was going to change, I had to be the one to change it. 

So here we are, at the 182nd Congress of the UCI. Around me on the stage are the other members of the UCI Management Committee. In front of me are the representatives of more than 150 national cycling federations from around the world. Behind them are the friends and families, the interested parties and partners, the curious public, and maybe even a few people who want to see inside the Palazzio and may only have one chance, whatever is going on there on the day. In an ante-room, rather unusually for the normally dry and uninteresting UCI Congress, large numbers of the world’s media are gathered.

The formalities have been observed, the annual reports have been presented and the real business of the meeting is underway – there are two candidates for the Presidency, Pat McQuaid and myself. Or are there? McQuaid has had some difficulty in actually submitting a valid nomination. The Constitution in place at the time states that “The candidates shall be nominated by their national federation”.  No more, no less. McQuaid is Irish but Cycling Ireland, after its Board initially supported his nomination, had had to withdraw after their members called a Special General Meeting and overturned the decision. 

As a Swiss resident (the UCI headquarters are at the World Cycling Centre in Aigle in the Vaud Canton of Switzerland, so it is admittedly necessary to base yourself there to fulfil the President’s role properly), McQuaid had then turned to Swiss Cycling, who then faced the same problem – their Board was initially supportive, but the members objected and the nomination was withdrawn. Remarkably, McQuaid had then claimed to be a member of “six or seven” national federations, of which apparently Thailand and Morocco had come to his rescue with last minute nominations. All of this just in time before the deadline of three months before the Congress. 

That has obviously left serious question marks for the Congress and its delegates. In what sense are these hitherto unknown memberships actually valid nominations by the candidate’s national federation? The arguments have raged back and forth all through the election campaign and are now continuing into the Congress itself. McQuaid and the UCI’s in-house consultant lawyer Philippe Verbiest, and their external lawyers too, are throwing everything they can at this debate. They drag in all sorts of bizarre allegations and conspiracy theories, but these are clearly distractions from the main issue – is McQuaid actually a validly nominated candidate or not?

On and on they go, red herring after red herring. Dubious point after dubious point. Unsubstantiated claim after unsubstantiated claim. The President of the UCI Ethics Commission is dragged into the fray and makes some astonishing claims with no evidence to support them, but stating that there are matters that have been raised with him that will need to be investigated, trying thereby to smear one or more of my Management Committee colleagues who are supporting me, and thus by implication me. 

Frustration levels are hitting the high ceiling of this magnificent setting. The cameras are rolling and the world’s media are watching either from the media room next door or on live stream around the world. The meeting, chaired for this item by the longest-standing UCI Vice President Artur Lopes of Portugal, is going round and round in circles. Delegates are beginning to despair that they will ever get out of there with their sanity intact. The media are astonished that the world of sports politics, usually tranquil on the surface whatever machinations are going on behind the scenes, has become so openly fraught. 

 Is McQuaid a valid candidate? Is there going to be a vote at all? On and on go the questions, the challenges, the assertions, the allegations, the expressions of sheer bemusement. We are making the UCI, no, we are making our sport, a laughing stock. Our credibility, which has already sunk to zero, is in danger of becoming subterranean. 

Something has to be done. This can’t go on. So I break the deadlock. I stand up and take the rostrum. “Vice President Lopes, delegates, we have all had enough. I propose that we go to a vote between the two candidates”. There is a massive cry of relief from the delegates and a huge ovation. McQuaid is clearly happy to go to a vote, he is convinced that as long as there is a vote then he will win, and Lopes is relieved that the responsibility is now off his shoulders. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the previous weeks of campaigning, of the last few hours of tendentious debate, we will have a result. 

But I have seized the day, and after so much uncertainty and frustration, that will go down well with many out there. Under the UCI’s continent-based electoral college, there are 42 voting delegates; 14 from Europe, 9 from Asia, 9 from Pan-America, 7 from Africa and 3 from Oceania. I already know that certain continents have voted to back me, and their Continental Presidents should have ensured that they will abide by their mandates. But it is a secret ballot and who knows what a voter might do behind the curtain of the voting booth? McQuaid and his acolytes have many friends, the UCI’s establishment has a powerful thread back through the years, with McQuaid’s predecessor Hein Verbuggen continuing to be one of the most influential people in the International Olympic Committee. I know well that favours can be, and have been, called in. 

So I have no idea what the result is going to be. The voting delegates are called up one by one to cast their votes. It seems to take an age. Then the scrutineers take the ballot boxes and start the count, under the eyes of our respective observers, in my case my campaign manager and British Cycling colleague Martin Gibbs. After several minutes, Martin looks over to me from the table on which the votes are being counted. There is the slightest inclination of his head. I’m pretty sure that means I’ve won. But, like everyone else, I now have to wait for the scrutineers to take the result to Vice President Lopes to make the official announcement. 

 He takes the rostrum. “Pat McQuaid has 18 votes. Brian Cookson has 24 votes. I therefore declare Brian Cookson President of the UCI”. So, the delegates have voted for change, for a new regime, for a new start. The next four years of my life are clearly going to be very different indeed. 

 McQuaid has the uncomfortable job of concluding the rest of the agenda, which doesn’t take long. Meanwhile, In Switzerland, the security company that Martin Gibbs and I have put on standby are waiting outside the UCI offices and my first job as UCI President is to instruct them to move into the building and secure the computer servers and network, to make sure any misbehaviour cannot be hidden. 

 After much shoulder slapping and handshaking, receiving the congratulations of many delegates and their colleagues from around the world, I move then out of the Salone dei Cinquecento and into the media conference in a nearby room. As I walk, surrounded by friends and supporters old and new, one of Machiavelli’s most famous quotes comes into my mind; “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things”.

I am to find out just how true and prescient that statement is, over the next four years.