ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the governance of a specific Sports Federations (IFs) overseeing a major sport, namely cycling and the Union Cycliste Internationale. IFs establish and control global rules, award championships to cities and countries, negotiate with sponsors and broadcasters and fight the excesses of sport such as doping and corruption. The political dimension concerns the relationship that IFs maintain in the political field. It reports on the manner in which political institutions seek to influence, or indeed regulate, international sport by means of the mobilisation of regulatory, financial and moral mechanisms or by various political influences. The management of the organisational governance of the administrative headquarters and the federal network is a challenge due to the very strong heterogeneity of continental and national structures in terms of professionalisation. Depending on the prevailing ethos and standards of fairness, an age restriction could be considered as discriminatory, illustrating the cultural and temporal relativity of an assessment of governance.
