Beyond the Tour de Romandie Féminin disqualifications - What’s really at stake in cycling’s latest row?
By the time the Tour de Romandie Féminin rolled out of Huémoz for its uphill prologue, the race had already lost five of its biggest teams. The official explanation was simple enough: a dispute over a GPS safety tracker the UCI wanted to test before the World Championships. The reality was more complicated, and it has been years in the making.
The immediate flashpoint was the governing body’s requirement that each team nominate one rider to carry the tracker. In theory, it was a trial of a technology designed to prevent tragedies like the death of Muriel Furrer last year, when emergency services could not quickly locate her after a crash in dense woodland. In practice, the rule was seen by teams as something else entirely, a unilateral assertion of control over equipment with little transparency over purpose, scope or data.
The rights question
The central tension is not new. In the professional peloton the right to mount any device on a bike has long belonged to the teams. It is more than a matter of mechanics, it is a safeguard that encompasses safety, liability and commercial rights. Organisers traditionally work with teams to integrate any new technology. The UCI, however, was not acting here as organiser of the Tour de Romandie Féminin but as regulator testing equipment for its own flagship race (the World Championships) and imposing it by regulation.
From the teams’ perspective that is a dangerous precedent. If a regulator can compel changes to equipment without consent, what stops it from dictating other technical, commercial or data-related terms in the future?
An old investment, a new conflict
In truth, the WorldTour peloton is not hostile to GPS safety tracking. Velon-affiliated teams have spent the better part of a decade building systems to capture and transmit rider data, culminating in a GPS tracker successfully deployed in the Tour de Suisse with full peloton coverage and in cooperation with the organiser. The UCI had been invited to observe those tests.
That history fuels the suspicion that this is less about safety than about control. Why run a limited trial on a handful of bikes when a proven all-rider system already exists? Why insist on using your own technology unless the real goal is ownership of the data and the platform?
The politics of control
This skirmish does not exist in isolation. It follows the dispute of the OneCycling project, a proposed overhaul of the sport’s calendar and revenue model backed by Saudi investment and championed by some of the same teams now expelled in Romandie. The UCI rejected the project this summer, citing governance concerns, but president David Lappartient has since indicated he is willing to speak directly with the investors.
From the teams’ point of view the through-line is clear: whenever a new structure threatens to dilute the UCI’s control, it is resisted or re-shaped. In Romandie the stakes may seem smaller, but the principle is the same.
What is really at stake
The row over a small piece of hardware masks bigger questions. Who controls the technical environment of professional cycling? How are safety innovations integrated, by collaboration or by decree? And when the regulator is also an event organiser, can those roles ever truly be separated?
The UCI has signalled it will consider further measures in response to the teams’ non-cooperation. The teams in turn have signalled they will not accept the erosion of their rights without a fight. The peloton starts the World Championships countdown with another rift between its most powerful blocs.
The tragedy is that both sides profess to want the same thing: safer racing. The risk is that in the absence of trust even that shared goal becomes another battlefield.
