During April 2023, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) published a document on its website entitled "UCI Road Equipment Registration Procedure - 2023 Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift" (abbreviated UCI RERP) for the 2023 edition of the two French races.
Consultations on the UCI RERP had been carried out with professional road cycling’s stakeholders, in particular teams, following the UCI Women's WorldTour and UCI WorldTour Seminar held in Monte Carlo (Monaco) at the end of November 2022, during which this subject had been discussed.
The UCI RERP has been set up so that teams have a clear process for registering the equipment they intend to use during the Tour de France and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. This procedure strengthens the UCI’s monitoring of equipment for regulatory compliance. It is a further assurance that equipment complies – particularly in terms of safety and commercial availability – with the existing UCI Regulations that teams have always been required to follow.
While teams are already required to register their equipment at the beginning of each season as part of the annual team registration procedure, as well as whenever they intend to use new equipment during the season, it is very common for their respective sponsors to supply them with new equipment shortly before the Tour de France and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.
The UCI RERP significantly improves the planning of the process for checking the conformity of the equipment used during the Tour de France and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. It will allow riders and teams to focus on their performance without having to undertake a last-minute procedure in relation to new equipment, or risk being forbidden just before the start of the race from using equipment that has not been checked beforehand.
From now on, teams are required to submit a list of the equipment they will be using more than one month in advance (according to a list provided by the UCI, as not all equipment is subject to this obligation). The equipment will then be checked by the UCI, which will give the green light for its use during the races or not. Regarding frames, the UCI has developed a tamper-proof tag using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. This RFID tag will be placed on frames by UCI staff in the days leading up to the races. The tag will be scanned at random intervals during the races to ensure that the equipment is the same as that registered a few days earlier. Once attached to a bicycle, the tamper-proof RFID tag cannot be removed without being destroyed, thereby making it unreadable by UCI scanners.