The EU will hope to ride to the rescue of a cycling team who was banned from competition for being sponsored by an online bookmaking website.
Tour de France organizers, spurred by France’s tight gambling laws, have barred the Unibet.com cycling team from entering the world’s best known cycling race.
Charlie McCreevy is the EU's internal market commissioner and he is taking Paris to court for its protectionism of French government run online gambling. McCreevy has thrown his support behind Green Cycle (the Unibet.com team) and the International Cycling Union for the reinstatement of Unibet.com to the Tour’s starting list.
The largest sponsor of the Tour de France is PMU (the French government run horse racing monopoly) which takes bets on the event, and McCreevy sees this as out and out hypocrisy. "The consistency of the French approach is highly questionable, given that other teams sponsored by gaming operators in France, such as the Francaise des jeux, are permitted to participate and given that the main sponsor of the event is in fact a gaming operator, the PMU,"
Interestingly enough, this year’s Tour de France starts and runs through Britain and then Belgium and is broadcast worldwide.
"The French state is trying to extend its cozy arrangement to other countries," a spokesperson for McCreevy said.
