Shortly after handing in the kilo petition to the Union Cycliste Internationale in Aigle, Carlton Reid of BikeBiz.com and track rider Julie Dominguez travelled the 50kms to Lausanne, home of the International Olympic Committee. A copy of the 10 000-strong petition was handed over. Today, the IOC has denied there’s any truth in the UCI president’s elect claim that it was the IOC which specified it had to be track events, not a road events, culled from the Olympic cycle programme.

This tallies with reports from national cycle federations surveyed in March about which events to cull.

Because of the entry of BMX into the Games, two cycle events had to be removed. This was known since 2003 but McQuaid said yesterday the UCI decided to “brazen it out”, hoping the IOC would forget about the deletion of the two events. Controversially, McQuaid also claimed it was the IOC which specified it had to be track events removed, a request that would fly in the face of the Olympic organisation’s neutrality.

In a news story about the handing over of the petition, sports news website Sportcal.com said the IOC had confirmed that McQuaid’s version of events was wide of the mark.
“Requests for changes to the Olympic programme come from the federations, in this case the UCI. They came to us wanting to put BMX on the schedule,” the IOC told Sportcal.com

The IOC also denied that it was responsible for the choice of the two track cycling events – not road cycling events – that had to be sacrificed for BMX.

In January 2005, internal UCI documents, seen by BikeBiz.com yesterday, show that the UCI had already discussed it would be track events culled from the Olympics, not road. But, in the March survey to the 24 national cycle federations, the list of events which federations could vote on to cull, road events were included. National federations were not told any vote for a road event would not be counted.

It’s believed the majority of federations voted to exclude the road time trial with only a small proportion voting for the exclusion of the kilo. However, once the UCI removed all the votes for the road time trial the next highest events to be culled were the kilo and the women’s 500m track time trial.

A highly placed source said:
“The UCI has three choices. Ignore the revelation that federations were not given the full facts; announce a review of the decision and a new, more statistically valid survey; or, at the very least, justify the deletion decisions by publishing all of the votes and reports from the federations.”