A victory for the UCI. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has rejected the Russian team Gazprom-RusVelo’s appeal, lodged last spring in an attempt to reverse the International Cycling Federation’s decision to suspend Russian teams from competitions. According to the body chaired by Frenchman David Lappartient, the Russian team Gazprom-RusVelo appealed its suspension to CAS on March 22, 2023. The decision was handed down on Wednesday, October 18. In March 2022, when the UCI decided to exclude all Russian teams in response to the outbreak of the military offensive in Ukraine, Gazprom-RusVelo was registered as a UCI ProTeam team. In April 2022, the Russian team’s Italian riders requested a meeting with David Lappartient. “It’s already been 50 days since my team-mates and I saw the possibility of doing our job revoked. We have seen our salaries and objectives suspended,” posted Nicola Conci, one of the seven Transalpine members of Gazprom-RusVelo, on his Twitter account.
