Velon Chief Executive Graham Bartlett has described the idea of riders being forced to sign their rights away under a contract addendum as "nonsense".
Cyclingnews has received a leaked document, set out below, that was sent from Velon to its 11 member teams, clearly entitled 'addendum to the contract between team and rider'. It sets out requirements relating to image rights and the processing of personal data and requests that the rider signs and returns it.
While Bartlett doesn’t deny the existence of the document, he says that its purpose is not to force the riders into signing over their image rights. “What it has been positioned as is that Velon has created the document and told the teams to do it and told the riders they must sign it and it’s just not true. It’s a nice story, but, unfortunately, it is complete nonsense,” Bartlett told Cyclingnews. “Every rider contract has to agree with the UCI provisions and the national law of the country and is in line with the model contract.
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“The important thing about that is that Velon is not involved in all of this, we don’t sign any contracts. We certainly don’t tell the teams of the riders, 'this is what your contract looks like'. This is a fundamental misunderstanding about what Velon is. Velon is an organisation that is wholly owned and controlled by its 11 shareholders. We do what they tell us to do. It’s not the other way around.”
However, Bartlett told Cyclingnews that the document in question was produced as a piece of advice for the 11 teams, or stakeholders, at their request. He says that as part of a project that the teams have developed to ‘bring the sport up to the level of other sports’ they wanted to look into their legal standing when it came to data rights and how they could apply it in races. As a result, Velon sought advice that it then returned to the teams. A second document was also produced to help the teams make an informed decision on whether or not to implement the changes.
“There was a central piece of knowledge that was made available to the teams for them to decide what they would like to do and how they would like to move forward in their discussions with their riders,” explained Bartlett. “That central piece of advice is a source that is available to the teams to, one, decide if they want to do that, two, look at their existing agreements and decide that they’ve already covered it or, three, change something and discuss it with the riders.
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