KZBlog

Team Astana will probably meet the UCI deadline of May 31stand retain its license. However the UCI has requested new guarantees of the team in order to ensure that it stays in the black to the end of the year. UCI threatened Team Astana with revocation of its license after the Kazakh sponsors failed to pay salaries to its riders for two months and used up its reserve cash. The UCI requires that all teams have $2 million in a bank account untouched.

The President of the UCI, Pat Mcquaid is quoted in Cycling Weekly as saying:

The deadline we’ve given them is a bank guarantee deadline and the payments are up to schedule. They’ve paid sums of money in recent weeks, and they may be in order. The bank guarantees I believe have been put back in place,” McQuaid said before the stage 19 of the Giro d’Italia to Mount Vesuvius.

However the UCI has made new requests of Team Astana. As of Friday the Kazakh authorities had not responded. The licensing commission meets in the middle of July so any decision to revoke the team’s license would be taken then. Of course, the question on everyone’s mind is whether the team will be able to ride in the Tour de France, the most famous cycling race and the one that Lance Armstrong has won seven consecutive times (1999-2005). The Tour starts on July 4th. General Manager Johan Bruyneel has said previously that the team will race in the Tour de France, whether as Team Astana or under different sponsorship.

Team Astana is primarily sponsored by a number of state-owned Kazakh companies including Air Astana, KazMunaiGas, KazZinc, and Kazakh Temir Zholi. However many of these companies have been unable to make payments due to the financial crisis and changes in the priority of spending state budget funds. Sponsors pay the Kazakh Cycling Federation who then pay Team Astana.