4. Make races more visible. More TV coverage etc. She suggests this is a matter of 'political will' of the governing bodies of the sport.
My problems with these arguments?
4. Yes, but it's easier said than done.
What do others think?
I only know about 4. As no one else has said I'm going to throw an often overlooked observation to do with coverage into the arena. Apart from status consciously attributed as some sports have done, women's sports can get anywhere near parity usually when the events are integrated/run parallel/broadly at the same time. So Tennis, athletics and so on. I think this point is overlooked to a very considerable extent and people say 'yeah, get it on tv'. Well how? Well why not just integrate the events instead.
The article does actually **get** bits of what needs to be done, but it could have gone into more detail. In the UK a lot of 'minority' coverage does actually start out as red button or recorded on websites. That's not even just BBC. ITV4 actually went red button for a lot of their coverage of the TDF going back a few years ago, they even specially launched a red button service for it. They then decided to go whole hog. Similar things in (bits of) track cycling. Yes, really.
So my suggestions would be 1) what they've suggested
2) Try and get broadcasters to do the same with perhaps shorter clips. It might even be easier than they think to licence this sort of stuff to bulk up 'boring' content deserts like the BBC website. If they don't like it there are a lot of other things you can do like rider features. Maybe do it centrally.
3) explore red button type service possibilities
4) integrating some events would go a very long way to solving these problems.
I know what people are going to say about integrating it. It can't be done and so on. The Giro donne is the only grand tour left. The 2012 variant was 9 stages. If you look at the mens and the rest days, mountain days, days spent in denmark/holland/the moon/whatever and time trials I think it's doable. All you do is be smart. The events don't even need to overlap. You could have the first 2 days of the Giro Donne run before the mens even starts and have a duality between 'days'. There are loads of dualities you could think up:- mens TT and women's gruelling mountain stage; men's rest day - women's long flat stage (perhaps even filling in some of the gaps; women's TT. Some of them would even add to the viewing experience. A rest day for viewers? Nope, you get a top end women's stage to watch rather than listening to Roche pontificating in the studio instead.