Brian Cookson ousted as UCI president after one term with David Lappartient emphatically elected in his place

Brian Cookson paid the price for a rising anti-British sentiment in cycling as cycling’s governing body, the UCI, voted Frenchman David Lappartient in as the organisation’s new president.

It was a humiliating, thumping defeat for Cookson who garnered just eight of the possible 45 votes to fall from world cycling’s most powerful position after the vote in Bergen, Norway.

Analysts and experts had predicted a close-run thing but at a time when Britain has “had enough of experts” (thank you, Michael Gove) it turns out cycling has had enough of Britain. Team Sky’s dominance, a raft of British Tour wins and the perception that the UK now wielded excessive influence over the sport all fed into Cookson’s Thursday beat-down, four years on from his triumphant ascension to the throne.

Arriving as the level-headed veteran and former British Cycling chief, Cookson was supposed to steer the sport into calmer waters but instead the noise around cycling grew and rarely for the right reasons.

A sport sick of being associated with scandal has turned its back on the countryman of Team Sky, whose scandals have been back (and front-)page news, but also British Cycling, an organisation that has similarly been engulfed by problems. And then, more widely, there is the spectre of doping – be it the abuse of TUEs, steroid doping or, more recently, motor doping – calendar problems and criticism for neglecting women’s cycling.

Lappartient, described as a “political animal and a smooth talker” by one cycling insider, has pledged to ban corticosteroids and tackle technological fraud – their term for the use of tiny motors to boost pedal power – while restoring the “disastrous reputation” of the UCI. The UCI overwhelmingly voted in favour of his plans.

Cookson, stoically describing himself as proud of his achievements after defeat, had been planning to double the investment in the women’s sport and felt he should be allowed to continue with his work of the previous four years, but the vote could barely have been more comprehensive. Not his fault? Possibly. But a 66-year-old Lancastrian struggled to sell the vision of a better future better than a 44-year-old Frenchman who has a clean slate behind him.

“The UCI I leave behind is unrecognisable from the organisation I took over in 2013 and I depart with my head held high,” said Cookson. “Someone needed to stand up and take on the previous regime, who had dragged cycling into the gutter, and I leave the UCI knowing that I have delivered all the promises I made four years ago.”

It seems as if Cookson will remember his presidency far more rosily than the rest of the UCI.