Morgan Fox, the co-owner of Irish Continental team EvoPro Racing, has strongly criticised the selection decisions made by Cycling Ireland for the World Championships in Flanders this week. He said he could not understand why more places were not filled.
Furthermore, Fox told stickybottle it was time for
Cycling Ireland to look at how it was running the high performance side of the
sport. In his view, the results on the track at the Olympic Games were “a
disaster”.
He questioned why Cycling Ireland’s high performance effort was so focused on bringing riders to Majorca and running much of the HP programme from the island. He believed the federation's approach was wrong and out of step with what other nations were doing.
Fox (46) is a former pro rider and was elite national road race champion in 1997. Now a successful businessman based in Ireland, he founded EvoPro Racing three years ago.
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At the time of writing, Cycling Ireland had not responded to stickybottle about the specific criticisms Fox sets out below. You can read the remainder of this piece by signing up to be a 'Stickybottle Supporter' for €5 per month.
He was strongly of the view national TT champion Conn McDunphy (EvoPro) should have been picked for these Worlds, as well as Matt Teggart (VC Villefranche Beaujolais). Fox stressed that even though McDunphy was one of his riders, his comments about him were merit-based. He insisted both McDunphy and Teggart were obvious choices for Flanders.
And he also believed more elite women should have been
selected rather than sending just one woman – Megan Armitage - for the road
race in Flanders, and none for the TT.
“Why would you not take your full allocation? And in the women’s race, what can you do with one rider; one rider
in any race? Why not pick other experienced riders that maybe a less
experienced person could learn from?”
In the men’s road race on Sunday, Fox accepted the Irish men’s team was not regarded as medal contenders this year – as Sam Bennett was out of the event and Eddie Dunbar had not raced for a time.
But Fox insisted it was still worth forming a full men’s team, of six rather than three, with designated leaders and designated domestiques. By taking that option, Ireland would be availing of an invaluable opportunity to expose as many riders as possible to the Worlds.
And he believed that experience may be
needed in the next few years when the Irish team went into a Worlds or
Europeans with a medal chance, specifically with Bennett. Instead, a team had
been selected for Flanders “to just tick a box”.
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(Cycling Ireland sets out specific
selection criteria for the World Championships and other major races. WorldTour
riders are almost guaranteed selection, once they are fit and healthy or
returned to their former level after injury. For non-WorldTour riders, if
certain results are achieved in UCI-ranked races they will have met the
selection criteria. However, in its document for this Worlds, Cycling Ireland
makes it clear it can also exercise discretion and pick riders who do not meet
the specific results-based criteria.)
“What I am upset about is that somebody has made these decisions (not to select riders for available places) but there doesn’t seem to be any accountability for it,” Fox said, adding most people in Irish cycling did not know who the selectors were.
Fox added the track programme this year
had the Olympics at its centre yet “nobody finished the races” at the Tokyo
Games; an outcome he described as “a disaster” and which needed to be examined.
“What was the budget for that over the
last four years? And we just weren’t at the level... With a track event, you
can measure the level. But you know in Olympic year the WorldTour riders will
be on the track and the speed goes up.
“There is no point saying after the
Olympics, ‘well, the level was much higher, we didn’t expect this’. The speed
goes up when you add the pro road riders into the track at the Olympics. It was
the same for the last Olympics and the one before that. You need to ride pro
road races (as part of track endurance preparation) for the Olympics.”
Fox pointed out that his team, EvoPro, also had Kiwi track cyclists Aaron Gate and Shane Archbold on its roster in the past. It was clear to him that those two riders – who have both been world champions on the track – regarded the pro road racing scene as a basic prerequisite for performing on the track at the Olympics and Worlds.
Having Gate and Archbold on his team only confirmed to him what he was seeing with other successful national track programmes; that those nations plan their endurance track programme off a base of pro road racing, with their riders in trade teams.
Yet, he said, Cycling Ireland’s base was
in Majorca detached from the European pro road racing scene, and where the
federation’s high performance resources were mostly reserved for a small group
of riders.
Fox explained that his team, EvoPro, had a house in Aalter, Belgium, and the track in Ghent was only about 10km away. From their base, riders’ of all categories could access racing as often as they wanted every week. It made the location ideal for road riders and track endurance riders alike.
He could not understand why Majorca was
the chosen Irish high performance base rather than putting a base in the heart
of the European scene and leveraging off it to the maximum - for juniors, U23s
and elites.
“We talked with the (Cycling Ireland) high performance people at the start of this year; trying to extend the hand of friendship. We said ‘look, we can actually help you out here; you can leave your vehicles in our place, you can use our service course, you don’t have to be flying people in and out and we can work our staff around Cycling Ireland.’
"We wanted an affiliation with Cycling Ireland and we have everything in place already. They seemed to agree when we spoke to them, but then it just kind of disappeared into nothing.”
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