SOUNDBITE (English) Brian Cookson, challenger for UCI presidency:“The most important challenge for the next president is to address the way cycling deals with doping. We need to give people reason to believe that the future will be different from the past. The reality is that the UCI is not trusted. Our anti-doping is not seen to be independent and we do not have the trust of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and other key agencies.”
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“If elected president, I will rapidly establish a completely independent anti-doping unit in cooperation with WADA. It will be managed and governed outside of the UCI so that people can have absolute confidence in our sport. It will be physically and politically separate from the UCI, responsible for all aspects of anti-doping, and report to a board totally independent from the UCI.”
“It’s absurd that a sport that has suffered so much from doping has been in open conflict with the very people that it should be working in partnership with. It’s therefore essential that we stop the UCI’s public feuding with WADA, the French and American national ant-doping agencies, and other anti-doing agencies. So, I will seek immediate peace with these key organisations in the first weeks of my presidency.”
