Hein Verbruggen was the powerful head of the International Cycling Union (UCI) between 1991 and 2005 who has now seen his name linked to the worst years of doping scandals in the sport.
Now 71, the Dutchman has moved from president to honorary president of the sport’s world governing body but despite being a major player in the global development of cycling, there is far from full support for his continued involvement.
“He’s still there. He doesn’t have to commit hara kiri (ritual suicide). He should just admit that mistakes were made,” cyclist David Millar, who has served a drugs ban, said after the Lance Armstrong doping scandal was laid bare last week.
Others, too, suspect that Verbruggen — who maintains that seven-time Tour de France winner Armstrong never doped — still pulls the strings at the UCI, not his replacement Pat McQuaid, who has been under pressure to respond to the failure to detect Armstrong and the doping program on the US rider’s US Postal Service team.
Opinionated, fiercely intelligent and with an apparent pragmatism bordering on cynicism, Verbruggen is a marketing specialist who was at Mars in the early 1970s when the confection giant sponsored a cycling team.
He rose through the ranks of cycling, joining the management committee of the International Professional Cycling Federation (FICP) in 1979, becoming its president in 1985.
Six years later, he brought the separate amateur and professional federations under the auspices of the UCI, with a view to the internationalization of the sport and greater recognition by the Olympic movement.
In 1995, he joined the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that he had previously disdained and became a key member. IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch gave him major responsibilities. Samaranch’s successor, Jacques Rogge, did likewise.
As a major player in world sport, Verbruggen saw doors open everywhere. His rise to prominence coincided with the end of a tough fight between the UCI and the owners of the Tour de France.
In 2008, the Dutchman was chairman of the co-ordination commission for the Beijing Olympics.
On anti-doping, Verbruggen has been matter-of-fact, in line with the more relaxed tradition of his country towards drugs, as far back as the late 1980s.
But in the 1990s, he was involved with trying to save cycling’s reputation amid controversy over blood doping, even willing to silence doubts about use of the blood booster erythropoetin (EPO) in 1994 and play down the scandal in the 1998 Tour.
A year later, though, he presided over the exclusion of Italian rider Marco Pantani from the Tour of Italy. He also sanctioned a test for EPO in 2001 before the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and other organisations.
