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Border Disorder

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Teams scramble rosters for Giro d’Italia amid passport panic

By Joe Lindsey

To quote Slim Pickens, “What in the Wide, Wide World of Sports is a-goin’ on here?”

Just days (now one) before the start of the Giro d’Italia, teams have been rushing to tweak rosters that should have been largely set weeks in advance.

The reason? Travel logistics. Teams ranging from WorldTour Astana and Trek to wildcard invites like Colombia and Androni Giocattoli have had to switch riders or fly them in at the last moment, because some of their original start list wasn’t approved for passports to British-controlled Northern Ireland, where the race starts.

Astana had to swap out two Kazakhs, Maxim Iglinsky and Alexey Lutsenko, because their passport applications (and physical passports) languished for weeks with the British embassy in Paris. Trek’s Julian Arredondo, a Colombian, got his at the last minute.

Passport document tie-ups for the Giro even forced the entire Colombia team out of the recent Tour of Turkey; they couldn’t travel to the race because all the riders’ passports were still with UK officials.

Even more last-minute, the Androni Giocattoli team flew in two of its Venezuelan riders, Jackson Rodriguez and Yonder Godoy, the day before the start because of similar red tape.

Androni manager Gianni Savio personally went to the British embassy in Rome to inquire about the holdup, and was told the passports were still in England. So he had the team’s press officer fly from Belfast to London, secure the documents, fly to Rome and then back to Belfast with Savio and the two riders.

Not exactly ideal race preparation.

So what’s going on? You’ll notice a pattern to the riders affected: they’re all from countries outside of the European Union. Those riders need EU visas to live and work in Europe during the season and this is annually a problem for many South American riders.

But Ireland and the United Kingdom (England, Scotland and Northern Ireland) are not part of what is called the Schengen Zone. That’s a 26-state body of the European Union which does not have internal passport controls; residents can travel freely within the area.

Non-EU residents need a separate visa to enter the UK. Americans and citizens of Commonwealth countries like Canada and Australia don’t need a separate entry visa; their passport alone will do. So the rules fall mostly on riders from South America, non-Commonwealth nations in Africa, and non-EU countries in Eastern Europe.

To apply for an entry visa, a team must send the person’s passport to the British embassy; officials send it to the passport and visa office in England, until it’s returned with the visa stamp. This is common practice with many countries’ visa applications process.

But when the documents didn’t come back in time, that left teams with a tough decision: wait until the last moment and hope they come through (and, if they don’t, start short-handed), or change rosters to riders who didn’t need a visa.

Astana took the latter option, subbing in Janez Brajkovic and Borut Bozic (who, sharp-eyed observers will note, are both citizens of Slovenia, which is in the Schengen Zone). But as the team stated, “Both Kazakh riders were training specifically for the Giro,” a not-so-subtle nod to the fact that swapping out riders who’d been targeting a particular role for a particular event was not exactly ideal.

Androni took the opposite tactic, and had it not played out, would have started with just seven riders. Again, not ideal. The entire episode isn’t good for the race; it makes things look chaotic and unprofessional.

The ultimate question here is who’s responsible? New Giro director Mauro Vegni sniffed dismissively that it was the teams’ fault, pointing out that the route had been announced in October.

And that’s likely true in at least some instances. It’s interesting to note that several teams with riders from South America or Eastern Europe had no issues. Movistar smoothly got leader Nairo Quintana approved, along with Costa Rican Andrey Amador.

Katusha managed visa applications for Maxim Belkov, Edoard Vorganov, and Vladimir Gusev; and even among wild-card teams, Neri Sottoli got Rafael Andriato (Brazil), Yonathan Monsalve (Venezuela), and Ramon Carretero (Panama) approved. So some teams may have applied later than they should have.

That said, it seems like bureaucratic red tape also played a role. Teams say they applied for visas in mid-April and only began to panic after not hearing any word for two straight weeks.

Among the lesser-realized effects of the issue is that, when riders don’t have their passports, they sometimes can’t travel to races or training camps (as Colombia learned with its costly Turkey DNS) because they still need to fly with passports. So they’re effectively home-bound, able to train at their European base, but perhaps not much else.

As well, it affects the chance for riders from certain countries to score UCI points—points that matter both for their career prospects, and for deciding the number of start spots a country like Colombia or Kazakhstan gets for national team races like the UCI World Championships or Olympics.

At any rate, the problem isn’t going away anytime soon. This year, for the first time in history, both the Giro and the Tour de France start in the UK. It might be smart to send those Tour applications now.


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