The UCI’s defeat in not one but two Belgian courts represents a significant success for component manufacturer SRAM, which is celebrating not just the legal victory but also the wider implications as it pushes for more industry involvement in UCI decision-making.
On Wednesday, SRAM’s October victory over the UCI at the Belgian Competition Authority was upheld by the Market Court in Brussels, which rejected the UCI’s appeal against the BCA ruling that had put a halt to its gear restriction protocol.
That protocol, designed with a view to improving rider safety by reducing speeds, was based on a maximum gear ratio equivalent to a 54T at the front and 11T at the rear, whereas SRAM’s top-tier road groupset comes with a 10-tooth smallest cog. SRAM argued that the proposed trials ‘exclusively and unfairly’ impacted SRAM, both in terms of the teams and riders it supplies, as well as the reputational and financial damage linked to the possible perception of its groupsets as unsafe.
“This case began as a dispute about our 10-tooth cog. Today’s ruling is much bigger than that,” said SRAM’s CEO, Ken Lousberg, in a statement sent to Cyclingnews.
“The Brussels Court of Appeal has issued a groundbreaking ruling on how sports federations across Europe must exercise regulatory power. The Court upheld the Belgian Competition Authority’s previous findings that open, transparent, objective, and non-discriminatory governance is the legal standard for rule-making in sport.
“It endorsed that reasoning in full, applying well-established European Court of Justice case law in a way that will guide federation governance well beyond this case, and sharply rebuking the UCI’s appeal.”
The ‘disc brake fiasco’ and industry exclusion
To understand the broader point SRAM is trying to make, there is some interesting reading buried in the Market Court’s 50-page ruling document.
In excerpts of internal minutes from a meeting with the UCI in April 2025, SRAM representatives noted: “They [UCI] seemed motivated by the disc brake fiasco a few years ago in order to exclude the industry from what they consider as the stakeholder groups.” [Editor’s note: this has been translated from French as it appears in the ruling document,…
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