Canadian WorldTour organizer on changes needed for the sport

Serge Arsenault, the organizer of the Grand Prix Cycliste de Québec and Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal, uses many different metaphors to describe the problems affecting professional cycling, which range from cancer to construction.

“I remember when I started looking at cycling in 1988,” recalls Arsenault. “I said to Hein Verbruggen, ‘We are in the Stone Age in terms of marketing and in our obligation of working together among riders, team owners, organizers and UCI.’ I said this is a cancer that will kill the sport if we don’t organize this sport internationally as soon as we can.”

Cycling’s struggle with the retention of sponsors prompts Arsenault to use another image: “You cannot make money with your hotel when the hotel is not completely finished because you have no customers,” he says. Simply, the sport needs fixing in order to be successful.

So how, then, does one remove the cancer or renovate the hotel? The key according to Arsenault, who’s also the president of the media company Groupe Serdy (his son Sébastien is the CEO), is by increasing the quality of the product through top races with top riders. Not all the pro races are as well organized as his two one-day events or the Tour Down Under. Nor do all the WorldTour races always attract the top-tier cyclists. Arsenault wants riders, team owners and race organizers to have frank discussions that will allow them to improve the quality of cycling. He thinks items such as a shorter race calendar should be on the table as well as increased internationalization of the sport to continue its reach beyond Europe.

“We cannot make money for the sport because the sport does not represent value for top international sponsors,” he says. “We have to get organized. We have to change everything. The money will come after.”

On the doping front, Arsenault thinks penalties should be stronger. He feels cycling has done more than any other sport to combat cheating, but it could do more. “You will always have cheaters in any profession who will try to talk advantage and break the rules,” he says. “I have one comment: when the crime doesn’t pay, it will disappear. When you’re caught, you should lose everything.

“The sanctions will have to be tougher not only for the rider but for his employer. At the moment, the team suffers a little bit, but it can escape from it. For example, I am president of my enterprise. Whatever happens in my company, I am the first one responsible, like a politician who has somebody in his ministry that does something wrong. When that happens, the minister resigns. You cannot accept ‘I didn’t know’ from the directeur sportif and the doctors of a team. That team should be downgraded to a lower division. It should lose its ProTour status.”

Another problem Arsenault identifies is the supremacy of the Tour de France in cycling’s race calendar. “I don’t have anything against the Tour de France, let me be clear,” he says, “but a sport is very sick, really sick when, if a team misses one competition, which is the Tour, it will jeopardize its existence. A sport cannot rely on one event.

“The Tour de France and [its organizer] the Amaury Sport Organization is the pinnacle of cycling. But we have the obligation to have other big meetings in sport between April and October so the sport can survive. With only the Tour de France, cycling will die.

“The evolution in cycling has to pass with help some other big players that will organize the sport, not only ASO. It’s not ASO’s fault. I’m quite positive toward ASO. And I want to be clear with that. I don’t want to be wrongly cited. ASO is doing a tremendous job. But now the UCI and other organizers have to put on tremendous quality of competition with a tremendous quality of TV production.”

Arsenault is hopeful that the various players in cycling—the riders, the team owners, the race organizer and the UCI—can work out these changes.