How to Grow Women's Pro-Cycling

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Flying_Monkey

Flying_Monkey

Recyclist
Location
Odawa
Forcing pro teams to have a women's section is like building a house from the roof down. You've got to build the base level before you before you try and increase the number of women competing professionally or you'll just end up with a load quota pros who aren't up to it and will just make the sport look stupid.

There are easily enough credible female cyclists in the world to sustain a top-level competition. The problem is the lack of interest from sponsors.
 

redcard

Veteran
Location
Paisley
Why do you think this is (or should be) about the male audience though? In the USA and Canada now, women constitute the main viewing base for women's soccer and hence it is growing, fast.

Every sport you've never heard of gets the 'fastest growing' tag.
 

Smokin Joe

Legendary Member
There are easily enough credible female cyclists in the world to sustain a top-level competition. The problem is the lack of interest from sponsors.
Now where near enough to mount 200 strong fields and three week stage races.

As for sponsors, they invest their money where they think public interest will provide the biggest return. Force them to do what they don't want to and they'll walk away and look somewhere else.
 

marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
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.
 

zizou

Veteran
Forcing pro teams to have a women's section is like building a house from the roof down. You've got to build the base level before you before you try and increase the number of women competing professionally or you'll just end up with a load quota pros who aren't up to it and will just make the sport look stupid.

Then it's a case of whether a sufficient number of women would be interested in racing. Even in athletics and tennis which have traditionally been sports which are more open to women their numbers are far exceeded by male participants.

+ 1 to that, the problems at the top are representative that at the grassroots of sport cycling - eg the club run - women are a very small minority and the ones that race are even smaller subsection. I dont know how it is across the rest of the country but at the Scottish crit championships last year there was only about 10 riders and within that there was quite a substantial mix in abilities that the mens races didnt have because with more entrants races can then be done via category group (with many potential racers not getting entry at all because it was over subscribed). There are going to be various reasons for this lack of participation at a grass roots level and that is a real problem that cycling has to address before worrying about the top of the game. Outside of the olympics sports like running and swimming get virtually no media coverage either yet at grassroots level there is much higher participation rates amongst women, how can these sports do it when cycling struggles?

As for the subject of compulsion to have male and female teams - the finances in pro cycling are bad enough without forcing teams into running token women teams too, its not like there are bundles of cash and spare sponsors floating about waiting to be spent.
 
Number of women's entries received for Welsh National Circuit Race Champs 2011 = 2 - not even enough for a full podium, let alone an interesting race. The category wasn't even run for this year's champs at Builth Wells. If it carries on like that, there won't be any women racing in a few years...
 

lukesdad

Guest
Nicole cooke raced men for years I can still picture her geeing the 3/4 cat riders to pick the pace up less they were caught.
 

Mr Haematocrit

msg me on kik for android
Why do we need womens races at all, in this time of equality we should just have bike racing in which the best compete against one another, the gender of someone is not important imho
By seperating women from men you are in fact suggesting that one is inferior as they are not able to compete with the other. Who wants to watch something which is lacking, inferior? - You can force teams to put ladies out there, but until they do the same races, same distances they will lack the same credibility to the general public.
 

oldroadman

Veteran
Location
Ubique
Why do we need womens races at all, in this time of equality we should just have bike racing in which the best compete against one another, the gender of someone is not important imho
By seperating women from men you are in fact suggesting that one is inferior as they are not able to compete with the other. Who wants to watch something which is lacking, inferior? - You can force teams to put ladies out there, but until they do the same races, same distances they will lack the same credibility to the general public.
Are you serious? Is this a wind-up? Have you actually looked comparativelyat levels of acceleration and agression? Do you want the women to look daft? Mixing does not work unless it's 1st cat women with 3/4/youth males, at amateur level only.
Pro level is a different world, credibility and attractive racing is because the riders are of similar ability, which women and men simply are not. No one's fault, just a simple fact. Please don't try to quote "exceptions" because if there are any, they are just that, and put into a 240km road race........
It's a bit like suggesting Anna Meares is on the same level of strength and speed as Jason Kenny. Both gold medallists, but different, and the sport is the better for it.
 

GrumpyGregry

Here for rides.
Are you serious? Is this a wind-up? Have you actually looked comparativelyat levels of acceleration and agression? Do you want the women to look daft? Mixing does not work unless it's 1st cat women with 3/4/youth males, at amateur level only.
Pro level is a different world, credibility and attractive racing is because the riders are of similar ability, which women and men simply are not. No one's fault, just a simple fact. Please don't try to quote "exceptions" because if there are any, they are just that, and put into a 240km road race........
It's a bit like suggesting Anna Meares is on the same level of strength and speed as Jason Kenny. Both gold medallists, but different, and the sport is the better for it.
and there is the rub.

in nearly every sport, and FM has rightly pointed at one of the few exceptions, if you picked the top 5, 10, 50 or 100 performers in the world for a dream team regardless of gender how many of them would be women? Then there is a question to ask about how inevitable this is given nearly all the sports are designed by men for men and women just take them up.

Take women's soccer, or rugby union. Knowing that on average elite women players generally don't have the strength and power and speed of their male peers why are they expected to perform on a pitch the same size as their male counterparts? The playing field is literally wrong. Why do the women themselves cavil at the idea of a slightly smaller pitch in both sports? The result of mismatch of pitch and players renders watching the women's elite games as something like non-league soccer or community rugby and isn't a great advert for elite women's sport.

So with cycling. If you made event 'open' and say had a field of 100 men and 100 women how many of the women are going to get top 20 places let alone podium finishes. Sure there's plenty of gurls who can kick my butt on and off road on a bike but then I'm not the sort of person they are racing against.

Men are the main consumers of sport as spectators, sports generally have been designed for men by men and women are therefore at a double disadvantage.
 

thom

____
Location
The Borough
and there is the rub.
...
Men are the main consumers of sport as spectators, sports generally have been designed for men by men and women are therefore at a double disadvantage.

Greg, to back up part of your thoughts and feed your Pooley penchant, take a read of this : Haute Route:

"Some of the guys are really fast and I've been hanging on to the front group, but it's great training," Pooley added.
"Peter Pouly – no relation – has been super-strong. He's just been playing with us really. He could go off [the front] any time he likes and ride to the finish alone 20 minutes ahead of the rest of us. So, for me, it has been great training because I've really being pushed on by the guys on the climbs and I've been riding on my limit quite a lot of the time which is great.

If an non-pro road cyclist compares like this, you can bet the whole pro peloton compares even more starkly.

I wouldn't take your line about adjusting the playing field to fit a woman's physique though. It's not really for people outside the sport to say and actually who's to say the men haven't got it wrong ?
Women's sports need to think about differentiating their products from the male versions because like in football, they have an opportunity to evolve to a place that leaves behind many of the issues in the male version. They don't need to try to make them exactly the same as the male versions.

There is a circular problem about women's sport requiring funding to improve the quality of the sport, to get more spectators, to attract more advertising/funding.
Personally, I think the people at the top of male dominated sports like cycling and football need to do more to promote their female versions. McQuaid for example does not have the energy to go about this and does not care enough to create a position of someone else doing it. Like in football, the female part of the sport suffers from having an entrenched old school power hungry supremo.

In a nut shell, it's not that the female versions are designed by men that is the main problem, it's that they're run by men.
 

BJH

Über Member
Cash can create it.

BC needs a road team to give somewhere for the track team to work and with the level of interest following the Olympics I am sure Dave Brailsford has realised he has to do something.

Let's have a Sky ladies team for a start.

In terms of big races here's a thought - why not put some BC cash into developing a large scale ToB for woman, while other races are falling apart and disappearing this could become huge on the calendar in woman's cycling
 
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