Carlos Verona rejects claim he triggered UCI action in Andorra €8,000 licence deposit row

Carlos Verona has moved to clear his name in the growing dispute over the €8,000 deposit linked to racing licences in Andorra, after he said the Andorran Cycling Federation pointed to him as the rider who alerted the UCI. In an open letter, the Lidl-Trek rider stressed that he never wanted the dispute to spill into the open. 

“The first thing I want to make clear is that I never intended to make these matters public,” Verona wrote, adding that he did so only “to clarify the facts” after the Federation made “direct references to me in the media” and through messages circulated among other professionals.

Verona’s central message was an unequivocal denial. “I want to be very clear: Carlos Verona has never reported the Andorran Cycling Federation to the UCI at any time,” he wrote. He confirmed that he had raised the topic in conversation with Adam Hansen, “our representative in the CPA”, describing it as part of broader discussions he has “regularly” about improving the sport. 

But Verona underlined that the concerns were not his alone. “Naturally, I was not the only rider who raised this concern,” he wrote, arguing that it was the scale of feedback that drove the next step.

According to Verona, the UCI’s involvement was a precautionary response while the issue is assessed, rather than a punishment. He said the governing body “decided to intervene and establish, as a precautionary measure, the possibility for riders” to process their licence outside their country of residence, a mechanism designed to prevent riders from being trapped by a single federation’s conditions during the review period.

Hansen, the CPA president, has already discussed the situation in The Domestique Hotseat recently, describing how widely the issue has spread among riders. “I’ve heard quite a bit about it,” he said, before adding that he had seen “more than 70 riders reach out”. Hansen said the move became official shortly before the holidays. “They made it official around the 18th of December,” he said, calling the timing difficult as it “caused quite a bit of a storm”.

A core concern, Hansen explained, is affordability and the length of time the money is inaccessible. Riders are being asked “to pay an €8,000 deposit,” he said, and “they can’t touch it until three years after they retire”. He argued that for many riders the sum is enormous relative to their income. “This €8,000 is 12% of a lot of people’s contracts,” he said. “So it’s a huge number.”