Women's road race at Tokyo Olympics - strength and depth

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) recently published the number of places available for each nation and the size of the field in the road races for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Olympic Games rings which represent five participating continents

In the men's road race there are 130 places available, while in the women's race there are 67 places.

Once again this has been followed by the customary outcry and accusations of sexism on the part of the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI).

In an article by cycling campaigner and former professional road racer, Kathryn Bertine she went so far as to suggest that the UCI and the IOC had a policy of "corrupt inequity" that is holding back future Olympians.

I must say that I am not really minded to join the chorus with Katryn Bertine and the numerous other women on this matter. When taking into account the entry criteria for the race, what the Olympics represents, the lack of strength and depth of women's racing compared with men's racing, and the intention to stage a rounded competition, I find it understandable that the field would be the size it is. I cannot see how a women's field of 130 would make for a good quality race in this event, one of the highest levels of women's international cycle racing.

One of the aims of the Olympic movement is to blend sport and culture, and promote sport to everyone across all five continents.

A women's cycle race featured in the Olympics for the first time in 1984 in Los Angeles. At that time the field had only 45 women from 16 nations, most which were in Europe. There wasn't much depth given that outside the top 20 finishers the time gaps over the 79.2km race were huge, with the last placed rider finishing almost 40 minutes behind the winner, Connie Carpenter of the USA.

Bear in mind too, that this event took place within a few weeks of the inaugural women's Tour de France. As funds were not available for women to compete in both sets of races on either side of the Atlantic, riders would have had to choose one or the other, particularly as they will have self-funded their competitions.

Thirty-five years on, the depth of women's racing has increased and many nations have access to funds to allow women to contest the Olympics. Also, riders from more continents are also entering the competition. In Tokyo there will be 42 nations represented in the women's road race, with more nations from Africa than ever before. We could therefore extrapolate that to mean a bigger field.

Indeed the size of the field has increased to almost 70. It is still a lot fewer than the men's field, and the figure has not increased significantly since the Athens Olympics in 2004. (Bear in mind that the men's field for Tokyo will be smaller than the field in Rio 2016.)
The size of the field for the women needs to be considered within the context of the depth of abilities from the different nations, and the question then is, what composition of race is needed when increasing the size of the women's field?

The depth of racing has strengthened, but this is the case when you look at specific continents rather than globally. When comparing the development of cycling between continents there is a vast disparity, meaning that the strength and depth in racing has been driven more from some continents than others - notably Europe, which includes countries like the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany which are churning out very strong riders.

So, if the number of riders in the Tokyo Olympic Women's Road Race is to be increased the result will be a field with a lot more riders from across Europe, plus USA and Australia.

That won't be so much of an Olympic competition tending towards the values and representation of the five contents of the Olympics movement, but more like just another Women's World Tour race.

The top riders, including Britain's Emma Pooley force the pace on Box Hill

So, the Olympic Road Cycling events need to find a way to include riders from the rest of North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and the rest of Australasia while maintaining a high level of competition.

Some nations may well be fielding their best riders, but they may still not be quite at UCI Women's World Tour level.

So it is only fair that the allotted quota of riders from the top nations be capped to a low number, so that those smaller nations that only have one or two riders can still take part in a more harmonised competition than if the field were dominated by nations sending teams with five or six high-ranking UCI Women's World Tour riders.

The qualification criteria for the Tokyo Olympics road race are:

• Nations in the top 15 UCI country rankings
• Highly-ranked individual riders in UCI rankings who represent nations outside of the top 15
• One highly-ranked rider from continental championships (Pan-American, Pan-African Pan-Asian)
• Highly-ranked riders in the 2019 World Road Race Championships, representing nations outside of the top 15
• Host nation (Japan) gets automatic qualification

This has given the opportunity for as many countries as possible to field riders so that a maximum spread of continents are involved in the Olympic Road Race.

When quotas for individual countries are examined, smaller nations may only have space for one or two riders, and these smaller nations are unlikely to have more than one rider who can mix it with the top racers.

So, to those who decry the apparent small field for the women's race and who are calling for a field size comparable to the men's race, I would be interested to know how they propose to increase the field, and how this would be composed.

Being a Londoner, I had the opportunity to watch the women's road race during the 2012 Olympics. What was shown on television and transmitted across the world were the attacks at the front of the 35-strong peloton by the likes of Ellen van Dijk, Kristin, Armstrong, Shelly Olds, Emma Pooley, and other highly-ranked riders. The race looked very exciting.

What those of us who spectated at the side of the road saw, and wasn't shown on TV were the 25 or so riders who couldn't handle the pace and were so far behind the front-runners and the main peloton. Each time the race scaled Box Hill, the gap to the gruppetto (the group of backmarkers) steadily increased, to the point that the last placed riders were easily 10 minutes behind Vos, Armitstead, and Zabelinskaya - the medallists.

These slower riders were mainly from Central American, South American, and Asian nations. They probably did the race of their lives and will definitely have a tale or two for their grand children, even though they were pulled out of the race for being outside of the time limit. But is this really the sort of competition they would have felt happy doing - given that they were probably used to being at the head of the pack in their home nations?

So having a larger field would mean either increasing the number of riders from the stronger nations - which would mean an even larger time gap between the front of the race and the back markers, with them being dropped even before reaching the Doushi Road climb, at KM60. Alternatively the number of riders from the smaller nations could be increased, which will mean far more than 25 riders being shelled off the back on the very testing roads near Mount Fuji, and the majority of them may end up not being allowed to complete the 137km-race.

Furthermore, that scenario would prove costly for those national delegations who may not even have the funds to take so many riders to Tokyo, and this could end up being a waste of money for sports governing bodies, commercial organisations and even the athletes themselves.

In my opinion neither of these scenarios would be a good advert for women's cycle racing.

Mt Fuji and Lake Yamanakako - the setting for the Tokyo Olympics road race

So, before people start calling "foul" to the UCI or the IOC for not having a larger women's field, it is worth bearing in mind the wider implications of simply increasing the number of women racers to equal the men's race men.

It is worth considering the global strength and depth of women's cycling compared to men's cycling, rather than just nominally replicating the size of the men's field.

Hopefully, on Sunday 26th July 2020 the 67-strong field will have the optimal mix of racers that will provide not only a high quality women's competition on the Doushi Road and the Kagosaka Pass, but also enough of a peloton left to see an exciting finale around the  Fuji International Speedway circuit.


UCI document on cycle events in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics


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10 Fast Facts on.... World Hour Record Holder, Evelyn Stevens

Last week the American racer Evelyn Stevens broke the women's hour record, beating the time set by Bridie O'Donnell just over a month ago. On her Specialized bike with a standard Shiv frame the Boels Dolmans rider covered 47.98km in 60 minutes around the 7-Eleven Velodrome in Colorado Springs. So who is Evie Stevens?

Apart from being the third woman to break the World Hour Record under the revised UCI rules after Molly Shaffer Van Houweling and Bridie O'Donnell, and being the team-mate of World Road Race Champion Lizzie Armitstead here are a few more fast facts.

1. Evelyn's first ever bike race was at a cyclo cross event in 2007. She didn't win and crashed loads of times.

2. Evelyn got into road cycling when she attended a local women's cycle training session in Central Park, New York in 2008 after her sister suggested it.

3. She only turned professional in 2010 aged almost 27, two years after taking up road racing seriously, and after a career working in investment banking.

4. Evelyn is an ambassador for World Bike Relief, a charity that aims to improve the lives of underprivileged people around the world by providing bicycles.

5. Her coach is Neal Henderson, who also coached BMC's Rohan Dennis - another rider to break the World Hour Record.

6. Evelyn is good friends with another BMC team rider, Taylor Phinney and she stayed with his parents in Colorado while there to make her world hour attempt.

7. Her husband, Brett works for Twitter.

8. Other professional racers who are interested in the hour record are waiting until after the Rio Olympics, but Evelyn has used her world hour record ride as a way to help her hopefully in the Olympics, by way of improving her power on the flat.

9. The track at Colorado Springs was 333.3m, which is shallower than the Olympic tracks, but better adapted for Evelyn's riding style as a non-track rider.

10. During her hour record different parts of her bike, including the bottom bracket had the grease removed in order to make more marginal gains on her speed when riding.

Congratulations!


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Yorkshire biking on my mind

Since the announcement of the route of this year's Tour de Yorkshire  I have been thinking about cycling in this great county!

It has been a while since I last rode in the Yorkshire lanes - in fact it was during the Grand Depart in Yorkshire. I remember very fondly that lovely day in July 2014 when we parked up at Elland Road football stadium and rode into Leeds city centre to see Chris Froome, Fabian Cancellara, Alberto Contador and Mark Cavendish set off for the Tour de France (from Yorkshire) with over 190 other riders. We then cycled on along closed roads with hundreds of other cyclists, up to the finish area in Harrogate. It was a shame Mark Cavendish crashed in the home strait, but we didn't let that get us down on what had been a fabulous day out.

It's about time I went back up to the White Rose County, especially as I spent my childhood in different parts of Yorkshire, and in the past I have done a few great cycle tours of the Yorkshire Dales, Moors and Wolds.

So which are the most noteworthy places for me?

Racing through Westwood Pasture, Beverley

Stage 1 of the Tour de Yorkshire leaves from Beverley, a lovely little town. When I travel up to East Yorkshire to see my family I like to take my bike and most rides I do involve passing through Beverley. A café stop around North Bar Within or at one of the squares (Saturday Market or Wednesday Market) makes for a nice end to a cycle ride.

The only King of the Mountains (KOM) bonus is on Greenhow Hill, near Harrogate. I have had mixed experiences on this 15% climb. The first time I rode up this hill was during a 200km audax event which began from Pateley Bridge. I had hoped to ride the route without needing to look at the map so the aim was to latch onto a group of local riders and stick with it. Unfortunately, starting the ride fresh off my drive from London was not the best idea. With no warm-up, tackling this climb so early into the ride was a bit tough on my legs. Consequently, I was unceremoniously dumped at the foot of the hill and left to crawl solemnly across the Yorkshire Dales for 20 miles, and over scary Fleet Moss before seeing another soul in Hawes.

The next time I was at Greenhow Hill was during another audax ride which began in Wigginton, a suburb of York. As before, I adopted the same strategy of hanging on to a big group of riders, relying on the fact that the guy at the front knew the way. We soon paid for our error of being presumptive when the group of 20 riders suddenly came to a stop at the side of the road realising we had gone completely off course! Fortunately, another rider took charge and we all followed again. The fact that he had a strong local accent gave me a bit of reassurance that he knew where we were going - as opposed to the previous leader with his southern accent!

Having a few (more) miles of warm up was definitely beneficial! We passed through the scenic town of Knaresborough, snacked at Ripley Castle Tea Rooms and had a quick look at the beautiful Brimham Rocks - all great preparation for the challenge! Once past Pateley Bridge the work began. On this occasion everyone stuck together on the hill at a steady pace, including on the sections that hit 18%. Once at the summit I smiled to myself in private celebration of having put the ghost to rest! I had conquered the Greenhowberg!

World Champion Lizzie Armitstead's home town, Otley is the setting for Stage 2, which is also the course for the women's race that will be contested that day. It would have been good to run the route back towards Ilkley and then go up a nice little climb in the area used last year known as Cow and Calf (or côte de la Vache et le Veau for the French organisers). I rode it once when returning from the Yorkshire Dales to Leeds. It's lovely and wide open with beautiful views over Ilkley Moor. Had it been included in the route the couple of steep ramps would have made for an interesting start to the race.

The last part of Stage 2 of the Tour de Yorkshire runs through areas that are a throwback from my childhood, as I lived in the area that straddles South Yorkshire and North-East Lincolnshire. I went to school around West Yorkshire and North-East Lincolnshire and remember journeys to netball matches and athletics meetings in different mining villages set in varying degrees of grimness. At least we experienced a bit of brightness in the gloom when we won quite a lot of our matches. I have fond memories of basking in Goal Attack glory outside the fish and chip shop a few times on our way home. Many of these villages became even gloomier after the decline of the local economy following the closure of the coal mines - notably between South Elmsall and Conisbrough.

Conisbrough Castle

On cycle rides around this area in recent years I have noticed a lot of landscaping, which has markedly improved the cosmetic appearance of the villages. Sprotborough is particularly scenic and Conisbrough Castle is still there - as well as the hill, which the professional riders in the men's and the women's race can look forward to at the end of this stage.

The étape reine is Stage 3, with lots of KOM points on offer from climbs within the North York Moors, among them Blakey Bank and Sutton Bank - one of the steepest classified roads in England.

One of the steepest 'A' roads in England

I rode up Blakey Bank during a cyclosportive as part of the York Rally Cycling event a few years ago. It was just like everything else in the North York Moors - no climbs below 15% gradient, hardly any flat stuff and you only have a few sheep and heather to motivate you as you grind your way up through the desolate moorland. Still, the views from the top are lovely once you get there! I wrote about my experiences of riding in this area on one of my weekend trips I did a few years ago. Happy days!

The route for this year's Tour de Yorkshire looks very interesting, and I would certainly like to see how it unfolds both in the men's 3-stage race and the women's race on the Stage 2 course.
Which section would I most like to ride? Stage 2 makes for a great nostalgia ride for me, but my heart says Stage 3 as I am a sucker for those punishing hills!

The 2016 Tour de Yorkshire is on 29th April - 1st May and starts in Beverley.


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Cyclists' hopes punctured at BBC SPOTY awards

Two cyclists nominated for Sports Personality of the Year but they fail to gain much public support

So it's that time of year when we celebrate sporting achievement (and their personality apparently) at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards (also known as SPOTY) and the public gets to vote for their favourite sportsperson from a list of nominations. This year the twelve nominees, elected from a panel that included olympians, heads of sports organisations, and individuals from sports media outlets came from the following areas: tennis (1), motorsport (1), track and field (3), boxing (1), cycling (2), rugby (1), football (1), gymnastics (1), and swimming (1).

The winner and runner-up were the sole representatives of their sports on the shortlist - tennis and rugby respectively. Third placed Jessica Ennis-Hill was one of three athletes in contention from the world of track and field. So it was good to see someone from that discipline up there in the roll of honour.

However, neither of the cyclists featured highly in the results. It looks even worse when you consider that both of them had achieved historical feats this year. Chris Froome became the first Briton to win the Tour de France twice, while Lizzie Armitstead was crowned World Road Race Champion on the back of a glittering run since the 2012 Olympics.

Andy Murray who was voted the Sports Personality of the Year 2015 did not win any major singles title at all. The closest he got to touching a Grand Slam trophy was during his spectacular defeat by Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open final in January. There then followed the usual British semi-final/quarter-final exit for the remaining Grand Slams. Although Murray won the Davis Cup tournament, that was a team event, and the Great Britain team received an award for that during the SPOTY ceremony on Sunday in Belfast.

Kevin Sinfield, the rugby player who finished second in this public-vote competition, did not win any specific championships during 2015. It appears that he received votes for being a really loyal and consistent athlete who scored loads of points during his career. Well done!

Since the winner is chosen on the basis of the number of on-line and telephone votes received from the public my question is why was there such muted support for Froomey and Lizzie (who finished 6th and 10th respectively in the vote) despite their achievements?

Note that the total number of scores amassed by the two cyclists was less than the number of votes received alone by Tyson Fury, the boxer who many campaigned to have removed from the list of nominations following his misogynistic and homophobic comments. He even finished fourth in the competition - close behind 2012 Olympics poster girl Jessica Ennis-Hill!

Scores on the doors

1st Andy Murray (tennis) - 361,446
2nd Kevin Sinfield (rugby) - 278,353
3rd Jessica Ennis-Hill (heptathlon) - 79,898
4th Tyson Fury (boxing) - 72,330
5th Lewis Hamilton (Formula 1) - 48,379
6th Chris Froome (cycling) - 39,007
7th Mo Farah (athletics) - 31,331
8th Max Whitlock (gymnastics) - 25,952
9th Greg Rutherford (long jump) - 23,492
10th Lizzie Armitstead (cycling) - 22,356
11th Adam Peaty (swimming) - 13,738
12th Lucy Bronze (football) - 13,236

1,009,498 votes cast

Some might argue that the SPOTY public vote throws up lots of anomalies. For instance, if it is also about an individual's personality how has someone who appears so dull and deadpan like Andy Murray managed to win twice? And why didn't Max Whitlock finish higher up in the placings after becoming the first British male gymnast to win a World Championship title?

My questions come against the backdrop that cycling is constantly being talked about as a sport that has garnered a phenomenal increase in interest from the public. Look at the crowds that turned out on the streets of Yorkshire and London for the Grand Depart last year. Furthermore, cyclists have had a track record for winning SPOTY - from Tom Simpson in 1965, Chris Hoy in 2008, Mark Cavendish in 2011 and Bradley Wiggins in 2012.

Perhaps the fact that Chris Froome's achievement at this year's Tour de France occurred under a cloud of scepticism and suspicion over doping. As for Lizzie Armitstead's outstanding season and her win at the World Road Race Championships, this seems largely to have slipped underneath everything!

I guess for Tyson Fury, whatever you think about him everybody knew his name by the time the SPOTY awards ceremony took place. And for him and his PR team they probably stuck firmly to the adage "there is no such thing as bad publicity"!

Perhaps next year the cyclists will be back. After all, in the last two Olympic years it was a cyclist who won the BBC award. Maybe Rio will bring good fortune to our pedal-powered heroes, and who knows we might see people ringing in or clicking their mouse in favour of Laura Trott or perhaps even Wiggo again!


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Fun at the Women's Tour

The Women's Tour was in town the week before last. I wasn't able to go down to watch all of the stages as I was working all week, but I did make it down to Marlow to see the final stage.

Having been to Marlow the previous week to meet the Wiggle Honda girls for a press ride to recce this stage I knew where I would need to go to track down the event.

Actually, it wasn't that difficult since all the bunting and road closures that I found when I got into the Marlow area were a sure sign for exactly where to go.

The first people I saw on my arrival, even before I'd picked up my media accreditation badge were the race doctors. Very handy as I was due to write a story about the doctor's role in the race for Cycling Weekly.

After quickly introducing myself and picking up my badge I caught up with the doctors, Will Mangar (right) and Matt Gray, who had been the first to the scene when Lizzie Armitstead crashed immediately after winning stage 1. It's always good to be able to be able to get one of your key interviews done early so you can focus on other aspects of the event for stories.

My next job was to sort out how I was going to get to the finish town at Hemel Hempstead. I didn't have a car, there were no direct trains and the indirect trains would not get me there in time for the finish.

Marianne Vos (centre) club run

The race route was around 100km, but there was a 40km short cut across the Chiltern Hills. World and Olympic Champion Marianne Vos was not racing the Women's Tour due to injury but she was in the UK to co-present TV coverage with Ned Boulting for ITV. On a few stages she had led a group ride to get from the start town to the finish town via a direct route.

On this day she was planning to do the same, but I felt too unfit to join her. I would have had to bust a gut to keep up with Marianne Vos's leisurely pace. (I had already experienced that a few days earlier when riding with the Wiggle Honda girls!) 

Hannah Barnes Best British rider

I feared I would arrive in Hemel Hempstead a sweaty, tired mess, trying to interview pro racers. They would look fresher after racing 100km than I would look after riding 40km! Travelling in a car was the most sensible option.

Thankfully, Sarah from Pro Women's Cycling website put me in contact with Alistair, who was driving the Press car that week, and is also the President of Scottish Cycling. So I managed to travel with him and Larry from VeloUK Cycling Mag to Hemel Hempstead. Really grateful to the guys for helping me out.Once those tasks were out of the way I managed to chat to different folks, take a few photos and enjoy the day - especially the victory of Hannah Barnes on this last very hilly stage. All in all, it was a fun day.



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