[Women's Cycling] The race that never was
Background
Cheating in professional sports is nothing new. We've had Lance Armstrong, Spygate (Patriots), the other Spygate (McLaren), the trash can at the Houston Astros, the Black Sox, NBA point shaving, etc.
However, this story is about professional cycling. The drugs that the top male riders at the Tour de France were using were - haha! I had you in the first half, not gonna lie. This particular controversy had absolutely nothing to do with men, drugs, or the Tour de France. It's the bizarre story of a race that never really happened, and I'm not talking about some old timey 1910s controversy where all we have to go off of are some old newspaper clippings, no, this happened in 2023 in the age of social media and cameras everywhere.
First, some background on professional cycling. As an endurance sport that is featured prominently once a year at the Tour de France and every four years at the Olympics, the average viewer usually thinks that it's just some special semi-pro event where the fast guy who you see out training on the multi-use-path by the park at 7am every morning signs up for. Reddit discussions are full of "Everybody in this event has been training just for this for the past 4 years"
Professional cycling, for both men and women, is organized through various domestic racing organizations for smaller races, with the larger races being organized by the International Cycling Union (UCI). The lines between tiers are a little blurrier than is typical for a soccer/football league or for an auto racing series: the top tier (World Tour) teams are required to race at every World Tour race, but are also allowed to race some of the lower tier races. And on the flip side, some of the lower tier (Continental) teams are invited to specific World Tour races. Critically, the top two Continental teams automatically get wildcard invites to all of the World Tour events, but are not required to attend. This creates an interesting dynamic, because it's actually better to be the top Continental team than it is the worst World Tour team, unlike other league systems with promotion/relegation. Because the World Tour teams must race every World Tour race, they end up spending a lot of resources to go to some of the more obscure World Tour Races. A top Continental team gets automatic wildcard invites to the Tour de France and all of the most important European races, but then can choose to skip out on some of the less 'bang for the buck' international races where the prize money / exposure isn't worth the logistics and travel expenses.
There's a complex point system that awards points to riders based on both how well they finish in a given race and how important the race is, with the more prestigious races paying out higher points. Then a team gets ranked based on how many points their riders have in total. The teams I'm referring to- here are "Trade Teams", which have a sponsor and likely pay their riders (unfortunately only the top Women's teams actually have a minimum salary, so there's plenty of women racing for no wages which is a whole different situation deserving of its own post - women's cycling might be one of the few professional sports where a majority of the professionals have a day-job and don't get paid, just get their racing expenses covered, which is part of why I'm calling this HobbyDrama and not ProfessionalSportsballMillionaireDrama).
To add a further wrinkle to this, once a year, individual countries organize a National Championship race that is only open to riders from that country, with the winner being able to be crowned National Champion for the next 12 months. These races still pay out UCI points, but since eligibility is based on your nationality, trade teams have unequal representation. You're the only New Zealander rider on Team Jumbo Visma? Guess that means you're racing with no teammates. You're one of eleven Belgians on Team Quickstep? Well, guess there's a lot of friendly competition.
Typically, the national championships are held pretty close together (since nobody can race multiples) and it's a mid-season break from the normal racing a bit like an All-Star Break or League Cup. Afterwards the trade teams re-form and it goes back normal.
Then, near the end of the season, there is a World Championship. This is a single race where the winner is crowned World Champion for the next 12 months, and teams are by country rather than by trade teams. They add up all the UCI points that a certain country has earned to determine the number of slots - most road races are only really feasible with 150-200 riders, so while normal races typically have about 22 trade teams of 8 riders each, the World Championship has more than 22 countries represented and only the countries with the most points can send big teams. It's probably also worth mentioning that the national cycling bodies determine who gets to go - if you have the most points of any rider from your country, that helps make sure your country gets a slot, but there is no guarantee that you personally are the one who gets to go. Then a national team is temporarily formed based on who has been selected, and they are supposed to work together despite being on different trade teams.
This points system is also how the Olympics selection works - different countries will get a certain number of starting slots based on their UCI points, then the countries select it. The Olympics is basically just a bigger and more prestigious instantiation of the World Championships, and it usually still takes a backseat to some of the more prestigious races like the Tour de France.
The 2023 Season
So if you're paying close attention, you may have noticed the following. A country's national cycling organization can organize a National Championship race, which pays out UCI points. The World Championship and Olympic qualifiers are based on how many UCI points all of the riders from a certain country have.
Enter the Tashkent City Women Professional Cycling Team (TCW), established in Uzbekistan in 2022 as a Continental team. It contains exclusively Uzbek riders. In 2023, TCW shows up at the Uzbekistan National Championship road race. And, wouldn't you know it, they absolutely dominate. The Top Ten riders are all on TCW, with Yanina Kuskova winning the championship, and they collect a boatload of UCI points - over 700 points from this single race, which occured in the middle of a week where there were four other races in Uzbekistan. The curious thing is that there is no evidence that this race ever happens. The Uzbek national cycling federation submitted results, sure, but there's no photos or videos of the event. Other teams claim that the race never even happened.
In addition, they collect a bunch of points at smaller events, such as some early-season races in Cyprus and in Belgrade in the summer. Other teams filed a protest, claiming that the Cyprus races didn't have enough participants to qualify for giving out UCI points, and claiming that the Belgrade race was entered by both the Tashkent City and the Uzbek National team as two separate teams which then worked together.
The other Continental teams claimed that Tashkent City was cheating by winning all these points at dubious events, just to get the wildcard invite to the Tour de France and qualify for spots at the 2024 Olympics. The UCI investigated and concluded that the National Championship never actually happened, and stripped the points. However, the team had enough points from the other events to still qualify as one of the top Continental teams and earn the Wildcard invites as well as two slots at the Olympics. There's some hand-wringing by the other Continental teams about it, and Tashkent City makes a statement like "Well, we're just happy to be here, we're going to try our best" and the 2023 season wraps.
The 2024 Season
Going in to 2024 with automatic invites to all the Women's World Tour Events, Tashkent City declined most of them, stating it lacked the resources to compete (noting that at this level of racing, it isn't showing up with a rider and a bike - teams need a bus for the riders, multiple support cars with spare bikes and coaches, mechanics, doctors, chefs, and all need to stay at hotels so it's quite expensive to attend, which is why I mentioned that the Wildcard invite without mandatory attendance is such a sweet gig, a top Continental team with limited budget can decline any event they want while the bottom World Tour teams are required to go no matter what)
Tashkent City did send a full squad of riders to the 2024 Tour de France Femmes, one of the most prestigious races on the calendar. This is an 8-day race covering almost 1,000 kilometers, with 154 riders from 22 teams. In typical stage racing rules, the fastest rider of each day is crowned the stage winner, then the rider with the fastest overall time wears the coveted Yellow Jersey each day and the fastest overall time is considered the winner of the event. The stages vary in profile - there are three flat stages, sometimes called "sprint" stages, where the terrain is very easy and the race usually sticks together in a big bunch, with the powerful sprinters going full effort just at the very end to be the fastest. There are two mountain stages, favoring the smaller climbers, and which usually determine the Yellow Jersey winner. There's two hilly stages, somewhere in between in terms of difficulty, that could go either way or be won by a small group called a 'breakaway'. Finally, there's one individual time trial, where riders take turns doing a short route by themselves, one at a time. Riders must finish a stage to start for the next - if you don't make it to the end of a stage, your Tour is over. This inspires some heroic stories of injured riders struggling up mountains hours after the winner has been decided, just so that they can finish and stay in the Tour for the next day.
Stage 1 was a flat, 123km sprint stage. It's fairly uncommon for riders to fail to finish this unless they crash or have a mechanical issue - staying in the peloton and drafting off of each other makes things much easier than the mountain stages to come. Unfortunately for Tashkent City, four of their seven riders were unable to keep up with the peloton and had to withdraw from the race. Over the next few days, another three riders dropped out, leaving team leader Yanina Kuskova to be the only finisher, bagging a 47th overall finish, about 55 minutes behind the leader. Certainly a respectable finish for a rider with no team support. The team was immediately criticized by the media and other teams, with the general complaint being that Tashkent City just wasn't very good and had gamed the points system to take the coveted Wildcard invite away from a more deserving European team that had earned its points in more difficult races.
The rest of the Women's World Tour races that Tashkent City raced didn't go much better. The Giro Rosa, of similar length and prestige to the Tour de France Femmes, only had one Tashkent rider finish. In the Tour de Suisse, Tashkent City riders were disqualified for holding onto the team car.
Onwards to the 2024 Paris Olympics, Uzbekistan had earned two starting slots among the 92 racers due to their standing in the UCI points (for comparison, that is the same number of slots as the United States, who would go on to win Gold). Our friend Yanina Kuskova was back, notching a 51st place finish for Uzbekistan, with her teammate Olga Zabelinksaya finishing 70th.
Consequences
In the aftermath of this performance, Tashkent City Women Professional Cycling Team collapsed. They claim that they have completed their mission of racing in the Olympics and blame a lack of resources and infrastructure from the Uzbekistan government for an inability to continue. Time will tell if Uzbekistan or another country decides to try a similar ruse for the 2028 Olympics, but that wouldn't get going until the 2027 season. To some extent, Tashkent City really did "get away with it" in that they exploited the points system to get the opportunity to race at a higher level than they had arguably learned, but the results themselves were exactly what you'd expect, they were completely irrelevant in those higher level races except as a source of drama. They kept a straight face til the end, there was no statement from the Uzbekistan government like "Ayyyyy we trolled you hard lmao get rekt" when the team folded, and it wasn't really a surprise that they didn't continue racing having achieved their dubious goal.
Yanina Kuskova has at least landed on her feet, signing with Laboral Kutxa - Fundacion Euskadi, a small Spanish team, for the 2025 season and continuing her professional cycling career.
Discussion
I think this drama was fascinating. The sheer audacity of a national cycling federation thinking, in the year 2023, when everyone has a smartphone taking photos and videos, and even amateur riders have a GPS that records their little weekend ride so their online friends can give them "Kudos" on social media, that they could get away with completely fabricating a professional bike race is absolutely absurd.
While most would agree that what they did was wrong (and by they, I mean the national cycling federation - I would not blame any of the riders themselves for any of this, they were simply trying to take what opportunities they could), it did expose some of the Eurocentric biases in professional cycling. It's an international sport, but all the big events are in Europe and most of the riders are European. The team promotion/relegation system is arguably somewhat broken in that, for most smaller budget teams, being a top Continental team with automatic optional Wildcard invites is better than being a bottom-feeding World Tour team that has to do it. And there's been criticism for years about World Tour teams farming points in their local lower-tier races. The teams will defend it by saying that it makes sense for them to race more near where their riders and fans are from. You could argue that the media calls it flirting when an Australian WorldTour team shows up at a bunch of smaller Australian races and blows the Continental teams out of the water, but harassment when an Uzbek Continental team shows up at smaller Uzbek races and blows everybody else out of the water. There's been criticsm for years that some of the smaller one-day Continental races in Belgium have a disproportionately high UCI points payout and the Belgian WorldTour teams (who are at the tippity top of the international rankings) collect a bunch off them there. The sport has been struggling to expand beyond the core Western Europe demographic, and the business model makes it really hard for new races in Asia, Africa, and the Americas to build momentum since it costs European teams a lot of money to travel there. There was nothing stopping other teams from showing up to some of these races that Tashkent City did (except for the Uzbekistan National Championship that didn't actually occur, lol)
BTW, if you enjoyed this, I have two previous cycling write-ups in Hobby Drama
Inflategate and the Hell of the North, which is about a professional Men's race