Post by FWS on Jul 26, 2014 12:49:51 GMT -6
For Female Riders, a Bit of Progress, a Very Small Bit
Tour de France 2014: Women Push to Compete in Cycling's Top Event
Kathryn Bertine wants women to have an equal opportunity to compete in the Tour de France. Credit Frederik Buyckx for The New York Times
By JULIET MACUR
New York Times
July 26, 2014
Female cyclists will race at the Tour de France on Sunday for the first time in 25 years, but anyone who thinks women haven’t been key participants in the sport’s top race obviously hasn’t been watching.
They appear prominently on every competition day of the Tour, and those women even make it to the awards podium. Come to think of it, their job is to be on the podium. They are Tour hostesses, crassly called podium girls, and their main tasks include looking pretty, helping riders don the leaders’ jerseys, kissing cheeks and smiling for photos.
Those hostesses probably gave the Amaury Sport Organization, which runs the race, and the International Cycling Union, the sport’s governing body, their fill of women at the Tour. The powers that be would probably have been happy with women as accessories to the athletes, not as athletes themselves.
But along came a group of athletes who couldn’t help shouting that something very wrong was happening in France, and in cycling. Their efforts have ushered 120 women to the starting line of La Course by le Tour de France, a 56-mile race around Paris, hours before the men roll into town for the Tour’s final stage.
Photo
It’s a tiny step, given that the women will ride only 2.5 percent of the Tour course, but it’s actually a huge step for a male-dominated sport with a history of sexism.
Last year, four female professional athletes formed Le Tour Entier (French for the Entire Tour), which pushed Amaury to let women race in the Tour as they did in the 1980s.
The driving forces were Marianne Vos, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, seven-time cyclocross world champion, three-time road cycling world champion and two-time track world champion; Chrissie Wellington, a four-time Ironman champion who is widely regarded as one of the best triathletes ever; Emma Pooley, a world time-trial champion and a silver medalist at the 2008 Olympics; and Kathryn Bertine, a middle-of-the-road cyclist from Bronxville, N.Y., a dual citizen who competes internationally for St. Kitts and Nevis.
Though Bertine doesn’t quite fit in with her superathlete colleagues, she was actually the catalyst for the movement to bring women back to the Tour.
“She pretty much single-handedly made this happen,” said Connie Carpenter-Phinney, the gold medalist in the first women’s Olympic road race, in 1984. “She made people sit up and listen.”
When Bertine, a former ESPN columnist, started racing, she noticed that the women in cycling, as in many other sports, were not treated as well as their male counterparts.
Their prize money was far less. (The cycling union didn’t mandate a minimum salary for female professionals as it did for the men.) Most of the races were shorter. (The cycling union capped the distance and duration of women’s races.) And the cycling union’s calendar included far fewer women’s races.
Bertine noticed what many veterans, including Carpenter-Phinney, had complained about for years: Women’s cycling had gone backward since booming in the ’80s, when the women’s road race made its Olympic debut, and women and men raced together at popular events like the Coors Classic in Colorado, which folded in 1988.
Back then, the women raced the Tour, too, or at least some stages of it and shared in the spotlight.
In subsequent years, as sponsorship money dwindled — and even when it didn’t, during Lance Armstrong’s heyday — cycling’s governing bodies watched as the women became marginalized.
In 2010, when Bill Ritter, then the governor of Colorado, announced with Armstrong that the Coors Classic would return the next year in a new version, a women’s component was not included. That race, the USA Pro Challenge, is one of the country’s most prominent road cycling events. It’s billed as America’s race, but that’s a misnomer because only men are invited.
These days, race organizers say keeping the course open for a women’s race isn’t feasible. Too hard to organize. Too expensive. Impossible logistics. Nope, no can do.
Yet the Tour of California, the biggest road cycling race in the United States, expanded to two days of women’s competition this year from one.
Going beyond a token day for women doesn’t seem to be on the Tour de France’s to-do list. Christian Prudhomme, the Tour’s race director, told me several years ago that a women’s event would cause too many logistical headaches. What he and other race directors are really saying, though, is that women’s sports are just not worth the trouble.
Bertine wanted to press the issue.
She began raising money for a documentary about women’s cycling, “Half the Road,” and about $77,000 came in, from at least 17 countries. Then she devised a proposal to bring women back to the Tour and sent it to the Amaury Sport Organization, convinced that change needed to happen “from the top down.”
No response.
Regrouping, she enlisted big names like Vos, Pooley and Wellington. They posted an online petition in 2013 asking that women be allowed to race the Tour. About 10,000 signatures appeared in two days. At the end of three weeks, nearly 100,000 people had signed the petition.
“That proved to me that there was interest in women’s cycling,” Bertine said.
The A.S.O. caved, inviting women back onto the roads that their male counterparts had been hogging for years.
Bertine and her colleagues didn’t wait for the International Cycling Union to effect change. Nor did they wait for USA Cycling, the governing body, to make women’s cycling its top priority.
In “Half the Road,” Brian Cookson, the current president of the cycling union, says that women are too slow and too weak to race a three-week Tour.
“You couldn’t do it over the same distances,” he said, before telling Bertine, “You’re going to shoot me down and say women are just as strong and just as powerful.”
Actually, in some ways, they are even more so.
The women’s Tour effort proves that if women take matters into their own hands, they actually can accomplish their goals.
“I can promise you that I won’t shut up about it,” Bertine said of her efforts to achieve parity with male cyclists.
Give that woman a podium. She’s the kind of squeaky wheel that women’s cycling, and most women’s sports, need to quicken the march toward equality.
Tour de France 2014: Women Push to Compete in Cycling's Top Event
Kathryn Bertine wants women to have an equal opportunity to compete in the Tour de France. Credit Frederik Buyckx for The New York Times
By JULIET MACUR
New York Times
July 26, 2014
Female cyclists will race at the Tour de France on Sunday for the first time in 25 years, but anyone who thinks women haven’t been key participants in the sport’s top race obviously hasn’t been watching.
They appear prominently on every competition day of the Tour, and those women even make it to the awards podium. Come to think of it, their job is to be on the podium. They are Tour hostesses, crassly called podium girls, and their main tasks include looking pretty, helping riders don the leaders’ jerseys, kissing cheeks and smiling for photos.
Those hostesses probably gave the Amaury Sport Organization, which runs the race, and the International Cycling Union, the sport’s governing body, their fill of women at the Tour. The powers that be would probably have been happy with women as accessories to the athletes, not as athletes themselves.
But along came a group of athletes who couldn’t help shouting that something very wrong was happening in France, and in cycling. Their efforts have ushered 120 women to the starting line of La Course by le Tour de France, a 56-mile race around Paris, hours before the men roll into town for the Tour’s final stage.
Photo
It’s a tiny step, given that the women will ride only 2.5 percent of the Tour course, but it’s actually a huge step for a male-dominated sport with a history of sexism.
Last year, four female professional athletes formed Le Tour Entier (French for the Entire Tour), which pushed Amaury to let women race in the Tour as they did in the 1980s.
The driving forces were Marianne Vos, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, seven-time cyclocross world champion, three-time road cycling world champion and two-time track world champion; Chrissie Wellington, a four-time Ironman champion who is widely regarded as one of the best triathletes ever; Emma Pooley, a world time-trial champion and a silver medalist at the 2008 Olympics; and Kathryn Bertine, a middle-of-the-road cyclist from Bronxville, N.Y., a dual citizen who competes internationally for St. Kitts and Nevis.
Though Bertine doesn’t quite fit in with her superathlete colleagues, she was actually the catalyst for the movement to bring women back to the Tour.
“She pretty much single-handedly made this happen,” said Connie Carpenter-Phinney, the gold medalist in the first women’s Olympic road race, in 1984. “She made people sit up and listen.”
When Bertine, a former ESPN columnist, started racing, she noticed that the women in cycling, as in many other sports, were not treated as well as their male counterparts.
Their prize money was far less. (The cycling union didn’t mandate a minimum salary for female professionals as it did for the men.) Most of the races were shorter. (The cycling union capped the distance and duration of women’s races.) And the cycling union’s calendar included far fewer women’s races.
Bertine noticed what many veterans, including Carpenter-Phinney, had complained about for years: Women’s cycling had gone backward since booming in the ’80s, when the women’s road race made its Olympic debut, and women and men raced together at popular events like the Coors Classic in Colorado, which folded in 1988.
Back then, the women raced the Tour, too, or at least some stages of it and shared in the spotlight.
In subsequent years, as sponsorship money dwindled — and even when it didn’t, during Lance Armstrong’s heyday — cycling’s governing bodies watched as the women became marginalized.
In 2010, when Bill Ritter, then the governor of Colorado, announced with Armstrong that the Coors Classic would return the next year in a new version, a women’s component was not included. That race, the USA Pro Challenge, is one of the country’s most prominent road cycling events. It’s billed as America’s race, but that’s a misnomer because only men are invited.
These days, race organizers say keeping the course open for a women’s race isn’t feasible. Too hard to organize. Too expensive. Impossible logistics. Nope, no can do.
Yet the Tour of California, the biggest road cycling race in the United States, expanded to two days of women’s competition this year from one.
Going beyond a token day for women doesn’t seem to be on the Tour de France’s to-do list. Christian Prudhomme, the Tour’s race director, told me several years ago that a women’s event would cause too many logistical headaches. What he and other race directors are really saying, though, is that women’s sports are just not worth the trouble.
Bertine wanted to press the issue.
She began raising money for a documentary about women’s cycling, “Half the Road,” and about $77,000 came in, from at least 17 countries. Then she devised a proposal to bring women back to the Tour and sent it to the Amaury Sport Organization, convinced that change needed to happen “from the top down.”
No response.
Regrouping, she enlisted big names like Vos, Pooley and Wellington. They posted an online petition in 2013 asking that women be allowed to race the Tour. About 10,000 signatures appeared in two days. At the end of three weeks, nearly 100,000 people had signed the petition.
“That proved to me that there was interest in women’s cycling,” Bertine said.
The A.S.O. caved, inviting women back onto the roads that their male counterparts had been hogging for years.
Bertine and her colleagues didn’t wait for the International Cycling Union to effect change. Nor did they wait for USA Cycling, the governing body, to make women’s cycling its top priority.
In “Half the Road,” Brian Cookson, the current president of the cycling union, says that women are too slow and too weak to race a three-week Tour.
“You couldn’t do it over the same distances,” he said, before telling Bertine, “You’re going to shoot me down and say women are just as strong and just as powerful.”
Actually, in some ways, they are even more so.
The women’s Tour effort proves that if women take matters into their own hands, they actually can accomplish their goals.
“I can promise you that I won’t shut up about it,” Bertine said of her efforts to achieve parity with male cyclists.
Give that woman a podium. She’s the kind of squeaky wheel that women’s cycling, and most women’s sports, need to quicken the march toward equality.
