Rock around the clock

Despite earlier fears that the Rock Racing team would not meet the deadline to satisfy the requirements of its UCI Continental status, USA Cycling officials said that team has secured its license for 2009.

“It went down to the wire but Rock Racing finally fulfilled all of its obligations for registering as a UCI Continental Team in 2009,” USA Cycling chief operating officer Sean Petty confirmed in an email to VeloNews.

The team faced a 4 p.m. deadline on Friday to meet a host of UCI requirements, chief among them the establishment of required trust account to ensure that contracted riders would be paid their salaries over the course of the season.

USA Cycling spokesman Andy Lee said that officials from the governing body conferred with Rock Racing representatives on Friday afternoon in a meeting that went beyond the official deadline. Petty’s email suggests that the meeting produced a satisfactory outcome.

The team unveiled a star-studded roster in November, and then announced in December that it had hired former European director Rudy Pevenage. But the 27-man roster immediately raised eyebrows among domestic racing insiders. Besides being too long a list to qualify under UCI rules for Continental registered teams, it included far too many older riders. The UCI created its Continental license (as opposed to the more prestigious Continental Pro) with the idea of using those teams as developmental squads. According to the rules, a majority of the riders must be younger than 28.

As a result, several high-profile riders, including reigning U.S. criterium champion Rahsaan Bahati, former U.S. road champion Chris Baldwin and stage race standout Michael Creed, were shifted to Rock’s domestic amateur club team.

Baden Cooke, one of the riders originally named to Rock’s Continental squad, has subsequently left the team, saying that the terms of the contract he’d been offered were not nearly as lucrative as those originally discussed when he was recruited late last year.

It would be something of an understatement to say that the team has not been without scandal since it ramped up its program at the end of 2007. Topping the list were the hirings of several riders implicated in current or past doping scandals, including Tyler Hamilton, Oscar Sevilla and Santiago Botero, all of whom were formally excluded from last year’s Tour of California because the three had each been implicated in Spain’s Operación Puerto investigation.

The team has subsequently hired another Puerto-tainted rider, Francisco Mancebo, who will join the squad this season. Botero has left to compete in his native Colombia. The Puerto case, which appeared to be over when a Spanish judge concluded that none of that country’s criminal statutes had been violated, is now said to be reopening after prosecutors successfully appealed that ruling.

The logistical problems, Cooke’s contractual dispute and financial problems at the team’s primary sponsor, fashion company Rock & Republic, all led to speculation that the team was poised at the brink of collapse. Friday’s news, however, suggests the team will — at least for the time being — live up to its own motto: “Rock Racing is here to stay.”

Petty’s email confirmed that, noting that the governing body “will inform the UCI that Rock Racing will be a Continental Team in 2009.”

FILED UNDER: Road