I'm not against cliffhangers, but I do feel annoyed at authors who cut chapters in the middle of a sentence. This one in particular is a pretty lame cliffhanger. No real feeling of suspense here.
Might have been better to reveal the reason, then leave it hanging at the question of "will this change the competition?". This would be even more tense of he went along and pushed for a "solution" that would clearly handicap the mc. Instead, we have a cliffhanger at "what stupid excuse is this guy going to push for?" So it's not "cliffhangery", despite trying very hard by cutting someone mid-sentence. It's just boring.
Then again, coming from an author that just ejected a potential romance interest as if he forgot about her for 20 chapters of so...