Freewheeling: Is women's professional cycle racing in a good place?

Demi Vollering wins Liege-Bastogne-Liege @GettySport

Phew, it's been breathtaking watching how the races have unfolded during this year's Spring Classics races - those tough one-day races in northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands over windswept, sometimes cobbled, sometimes undulating terrain, often in the rain. No one must be more out of breath than SD Worx rider Demi Vollering, who completed the Ardennes Classics triple in scintillating style by winning the Amstel Gold, Flèche-Wallone, and Liège-Bastogne-Liege - a feat last achieved by her mentor and team Sports Director, Anna van der Breggen in 2017.

As women's professional cycling continues to grow and more is being done to achieve parity with men's cycle racing, it is worth doing a stop and check, and asking if women's professional cycle racing really is in a good place?

Vive Le Tour de France Femmes

It has been great to see that sports event organiser Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO) continue to add to its sports portfolio by staging the Paris-Roubaix Femmes and a Tour de France Femmes. Last year's renaissance competition caught the eye of millions as the women raced around the streets of Paris on that hot Sunday afternoon during Stage 1 in the last week of July, right before the men raced the traditional finale. For many, it was an emotional day to see a women's peloton starting the stage race using the infrastructure of the iconic cycle race - something for which the likes of former professional cyclist Kathryn Bertine, and others including multiple World Champion Marianne Vos have campaigned for decades.

ASO were very happy with the viewing figures in France, with 20 million viewers on France 2 and France 3 free-to-air television channels across the whole race. There were on average 2.25 million viewers per day, making an audience share of 26.4%, and notably 5.1 million during the showdown between Vollering and Annemiek Van Vleuten on the final stage, on La Super Planche des Belles Filles. Across Europe 14 million viewers in seven countries tuned into fee-paying Eurosport. Naturally ratings were solid in the Netherlands with audience share of its national TV station, NOS being 45% as fans tuned in to watch their compatriot heroes race their way onto the podium and don the winning jerseys - Van Vleuten in yellow, Vollering in polka dots, Vos in green, and Shirin Van Anrooij in white. 

British hopes would normally have been placed on the top road racer, Lizzie Deignan, who won the inaugural Paris-Roubaix Femmes, but she was away on maternity leave. That will have impacted on viewing figures on this side of the English Channel.

Stage 1 of 2022 revived Tour de France Femmes

Meanwhile in France, crowds came out in force along the road sides for key stages in Paris, on the gravel roads into Bar-sur-Aube during Stage Four, and at the finale on the slopes of the Vosgian mountain passes. But even Tour Director, Marion Rousse said that there were questions to be asked around the lack of roadside spectators on other stages.

In some cycle races, local schools get the children to come out of their classrooms to watch the race, and make some noise. That generally makes for good viewing to see crowds of young, excited faces and their high pitched cheers ring out loudly as the television cameras pan through the town centres. But with the Tour de France Femmes being in late July, many schools are already closed for the holidays. 

Growth is in the eyeballs of the beholder

Very importantly, the number of eyeballs on a race is a key factor in the growth of any sport. It's important to have the viewing figures, and it also looks good for viewers when they watch images of competitors battling it out in front of enthusiastic crowds. 

While sports fans avidly watch their athletic heroes performing well, they also like the stories and the characters behind the sport - the professional who was just a weekend warrior barely a year previously; the outspoken activist; the rivalries - between teams or even within a team; the bad boy/girl; the athlete making a come-back following a serious injury or illness.

The highly successful Netflix Formula 1 docusoap Drive to Survive has consistently attracted the same comment - "I don't follow F1; I don't know anything about motorsport; but I am fascinated by the characters and the stories."

Personally, I think we need a bit of that in cycling, and particularly in women's professional cycling. Cycling fans marvel on social media over who they believe to be the GOAT (greatest of all time) - be it Marianne Vos or Annemiek Van Vleuten in the modern era, Beryl Burton from the vintage times, or Jeannie Longo if they want to go for a controversial choice. Whoever your don't want athletes who when they are interviewed are just a bit too.....I dare say, "ordinary"! Many of these athletes just talk about their racing, their calendar, their strategy, and they will have been media-prepped to not stray off that line. That's all well and good for the purist fan. But a sport cannot live on purists alone. There needs to be an extra dimension that can attract a wider audience and give a wow factor - or at least a story that chimes with observers.

Marianne Vos, for many the GOAT

Recently, a camera crew on the famous Koppenberg climb on the route of the Tour of Flanders, asked a group of women riders to move out of the way so that they could film one of the top men's teams doing their training ride over the cobbles. 

The camera crew failed to recognise that among the women they budged out was a certain Lotte Kopecky - defending champion of the race, a native of Flanders (voted Flandrian of the Year) as well as being winner of other classics like Het Nieuwsblad and Strade Bianche, plus a multiple World and European Track cycling champion. 

I previously wrote an article in Rouleur magazine about a big sporting rivalry in the 1980s - not Borg and McEnroe, but Longo and Canins. Two of the best women riders of that era, who dominated the erstwhile Tour de France Feminin. Jeannie Longo was a former Alpine skier from the French Alps, while Maria Canins was a former cross country skier from the Italian Dolomites. A young firebrand demoiselle against la mamma volante (on account of her juggling her racing with being a mother). This rivalry filled column inches of the sports pages and garnered curious as well as dedicated fans to support team Longo or team Canins. Both women have reminisced whimsically about those days when they had their faces plastered on the front of popular sports newspapers like Gazzetto dello Sport or L'Equipe. Longo also appeared on sports shows on French television. 

Everybody loves a story - where is it? We need it! 

Among the sea of women's teams today, a couple of frontrunners have emerged in the race for World Tour supremacy, with both teams having a clutch of World and National Champions in their fold. I'm talking about Trek-Segafredo and SD Worx. Wouldn't things be spiced up if we had a Manchester City v Arsenal type rivalry going on?

While there are quite a few riders who have shown true grit on the road, there don't seem to be any real characters that do acts that go beyond sport. Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig's trademark effusive post-race interviews attract interest and have brought her a significant following, and a comparatively less well-known Canadian, Alison Jackson - the surprise winner of Paris-Roubaix Femmes - got people talking as much about her sporting achievement as for her post-race dances on social media. But it seems to be limited to that. Let's hope Alison wins a few more races.

In short, we see some great racing in the women's game and there are some outstanding riders. But we could do with more characters and back-stories to make the sport. That's what garners a wider interest than just pure sport, and what brings more eyeballs, and hence increasing TV deals, and sponsorship. We all want to see our favourite sport on television, but clearly given the costs of televising a sport event, there needs to be something in it for the organisers who would sell the rights, and the broadcast companies who purchase the rights, and ultimately the sponsors and advertisers who are hoping to get the visibility and the returns. 

There needs to be solid evidence that loads of people will watch the event on TV. The Tour de France Femmes last year was deemed a success in terms of viewing figures which is great, but that scenario needs to be replicated again and again across the collection of big races in the racing calendar. As annoying as it may be that a women's cycle race isn't shown on terrestrial TV, it has to be kept in mind that it's an ambitious expectation to see a race televised if viewing figures are measured in the thousands - which is not uncommon for some World Tour races -  rather than in the millions.  

Sadly, sponsorship was lacking when it came to the Women's Tour of Britain race. The week-long stage competition had been running since 2014, attracting the best riders in the world, and was a paragon of parity in sport, with the race being televised on terrestrial free-to-air TV in the UK, and offering over a 90,000-euro prize fund - equal to the men's Tour of Britain, and more generous than other World Tour races apart from the Ride London Classique, and the later revived Tour de France Femmes.

But the organisers, Sweetspot, could not sustain this model and find a company willing to become the headline sponsor once the OVO Energy sponsorship ended after 2019. The event took place in 2022 but without a headline sponsor, but this could not continue for 2023. With funds desperately needed following the departure of other sponsors of the winners' jerseys and a vehicle sponsor, crowd funding was set up to try to make up the £500,000 shortfall. Sadly, there was no light at the end of the tunnel for this year.

The organisers, hope to hold the race in 2024, but that remains to be seen. The Vårgårda one-day race in Sweden has been stopped altogether due to economic reasons. Meanwhile, the women's Vuelta a España race, which had been held over one or two days in the September (and known as the Challenge Madrid) has been brought forward to May and will be a week-long stage race. The inaugural women's United Arab Emirates Tour took place in February over four days, and two newish stage races - the Tour de Suisse and the Tour de Romandie continue to establish themselves in the women's racing calendar. The women's calendar is busier than ever with 27 races (including 13 stage races) on the calendar, up from 23 in 2022. This is a far cry from the 17 races (including four stage races) when the calendar was established in 2016.

On paper professional women appear to have significantly less racing to do than their male counterparts who have 20 one-day races and 15 stage races (of which three are three weeks long) on their calendar. But in fact a men's team has around 30 riders in its squad, with an average of 12 sports directors/associate sports directors, so they can run dual squads in parallel. Women's teams don't have the resources to do that, especially as many teams will have just one or two sports directors, and 15 riders to fill the calendar. It is not uncommon for teams to run overlapping squads, and some also have a development squad too, but still, athletes can quickly become maxed out in racing if there are any injury or illness issues. This was a problem for Trek-Segafredo, which led to Lizzie Deignan returning to racing slightly earlier than planned. 

Some of the smaller World Tour Teams have said that the changes in structure and conditions in women's professional racing - increased minimum wages, greater prize money, television coverage, maternity pay - are very welcome, even long overdue. However, this can only be sustained with more cash, which can be challenging to find and sustain.

In the words of a UK Prime Minister, "There is no magic money tree".

Hoping for a great future

As well as the unfortunate absence of a few races from the 2023, in the last couple of years teams have spectacularly folded, among them Team Virtu Cycling, Paule Ka, and B&B Hotels - which led to Chloe Hosking unexpectedly facing the prospect of an early retirement from racing. Lifeplus-Wahoo had previously been a World Tour team (when sponsored Trek), but sponsorship issues led to the outfit dropping down to a Continental team status. As for Zaaf Cycling Team, this has been a catastrophe with several riders leaving, including French National Champion Audrey Cordon-Ragot (who had also been a casualty of the B&B Hotels fall-out) after there were reports of riders and staff not being paid.

Development in women's professional sport is always a good thing. But it is also important that any growth be sustainable. This apparent boom in women's professional cycle racing will do wonders for the future of the sport - for athletes, businesses, media, and inspiring more girls and women to get on a bicycle. But the proportionate financial support needs to be there to keep things going, and there needs to be an incentive for corporations to want to pour money into the sport. 

Serena Williams 

In my opinion, the incentive comes down to eyeballs - maybe a Megan Rapinoe moment, which raised the profile of women's football during the 2019 Fifa Football World Cup, or a Serena (Williams) Slam, circa 2003 and with the matching flamboyance and character - or is it sacrilege if I mention a Lance Armstrong moment - but without the industrial scale doping programme and bullying.

Megan Rapinoe at the 2019 football World Cup

Putting women's professional cycling properly on the map like sports such as football or tennis is easier said than done, at a time when professional women's cycle racing is finding its climbing legs. But I think the gains for the sport would be significant, and can move it from it's current reasonably good place, to a great place.

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Photo of the day - 20: Women gearing up for the National Hill Climb Championships

 

Finish line of Bank Road hill climb: Haddi Conant (with Simon
"100 Climbs" Warren in the background)

With less than a week to go until the National Hill Climb championships there is a bit of fanfare goinng on around the fact that there will be a record turn-out of women competing at the event. A former full-time road racer, Laurie Pestana led a campaign to "flood the National Hill Climb Championships with female entries (ideally 100+ entries), women would have their entry fees paid for them. (Rather like what Helen Wyman did a few years ago to get under-23 women to compete in the National Cyclocross Championships). This was done as a way to encourage a greater female participation at the event, and get organisers to commit to paying equal prize money for the male and female winners. Observers say around 140 women signed up for the event, so folks have been excited at this unprecedented occasion. Some of the entrants were at the Hill Climb at Bank Road. One of the women was Haddi Conant, who has taken to wearing a campaign banner on her back at the races she's been doing. She initially had a banner that said "Equal prize money for men and women!!" But once she heard that equal prize money was being offered at the Bank Hill event and at the National Championships she changed the wording. Haddi has also made a film as part of her campaign. In parallel to this, another rider Gemma Wilks is making a film about women's participation in cycling, as a way to showcase what women do, in a hope of inspiring other women. I am all for doing anything to encourage more women to take up cycling and also to sign up for races. In fact, I have been involved in initiatives, such as the London Women's Cycle Racing League, back in 2010. That has gotten people many women into cycling. It is all very well for women to campaign for equal prize money or better recognition etc in the sport. However, I feel that at grass roots level, women need to step up to the plate more themselves. Sometimes I find it surprising the disparity in the number of women who campaign for various gender issues related to sport vs how many women actually turn up at the start lines of races. I know of race organisers who put on races for women, only to have barely a handful of women turn up. Some even have to cancel races due to a lack of participants - or run the race at a substantial financial loss. During the road racing season, at least once every few weeks a race organiser puts out an appeal for more entrants because at two weeks out from the race he or she has barely 10 women signed up. So while it is great to ask for certain things from those who organise the races, we should also satisfy our end of the deal by participating regularly. Men may be perceived as receiving more favourable treatment, but then again when a race is organised the men always turn out. With women it can be very hit and miss, and high risk especially for people who are running these events on a shoestring budget and organise races as a labour of love. Some folks claim that organisers need to engage with women more, or do more to make us feel welcome. But then I say, why should organisers do more for women than they would do for men? It's ironic to say, "We want gender parity, but can you do more marketing to we women, encourage us more and give us more of a welcome than you do with men so more of us can turn up?" You can't cherry pick what you want equality to look like. I say, if women want comparable returns to the men from race organisers they need to put themselves out there, rather than grumbling from the side lines. I am glad to see that the National Hill Climbing Championships will have so many female competitors. I hope this can be repeated regularly across all kinds of races, and without always needing special campaigns.   

My moment of the week - 3

Another step towards equal pay

News from Twenty20 Cycling

Milestone: Koppenbergcross is the first European cyclocross to give equal prize money, powered by Twenty20 Cycling.

The Koppenbergcross in Oudenaarde sets a new milestone in the history of cyclocross. In cooperation with the American company Twenty20 Cycling we are the first European cyclocross to provide equal prize money for men elite and women. So far there was a gap of over five thousand euros between the prize scales for men and women in first category races, such as the Koppenbergcross. A gap that the Sint-Pietersvrienden, organizers of the Koppenbergcross, now decided to close.

 

The winner of the GP Twenty20 Cycling (the new name of our women’s race) on Saturday November 1st 2014 is no longer rewarded by 350 euros but by 1667. Exactly the same as the next winner of our GP Willy Naessens for men elite. The same counts for all riders further down the results of our men and women’s race. A clear signal with which we hope to help the current growth of the Koppenbergcross and women’s cyclocross. So far, the world championships were the only cyclocross races on European soil to give equal prize money.

The British rider Helen Wyman – European champion cyclocross, member of the cyclocross committee of the international cycling federation, triple winner of our race and resident of Oudenaarde – is obviously happy with this step.

 

"In my eyes, this is a huge step. It is a very significant moment for women's cycling. This allows women to make one step up the ladder towards equality. I spend a lot of my free time trying to advance women’s cyclocross and I hope this will lead to a chain reaction of races who do the same, as I know the support is there from sponsors, supporters and riders. To be a part of this development for the sport is fantastic for me.”

“For the Koppenbergcross to be the first race in Europe to do this is very special. I love the Koppenbergcross, to me it is the biggest race outside of the World Championships. It is legendary. To have an American sponsor back the race shows how significant it is around the world. I can't thank Twenty20 Cycling enough on behalf of all of the racers that take part next season. I'm certainly already looking forward to the GP Twenty20 Cycling and hope to collect another cobble stone in 2014.”

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I am very pleased to hear such positive news for women's cycle racing, especially in a world where the gap in prize money between the genders is shameful.

 

The winner of the 2013 Tour de France won 450,000 euros. The winner of the women's equivalent race in 2013, the Giro Rosa, won 460 euros! Marianne Vos, one of the greatest female cyclists, who has World Championship titles not just in cyclo cross but also in road racing and track cycling, plus Olympic titles can earn up to 80,000 euros per year. That is a decent salary, but compare that to the 2 million euros of Bradley Wiggins!

 

Furthermore professional male cyclists in a ProTour team are guaranteed a minimum salary of 30,000 euros per year. Women racers in equivalent level teams, on the other hand receive no minimum salary, with some only earning just 6,000 euros per annum, and many having day jobs in parallel to their cycle racing.

I understand that lobbying is constantly taking place, not least by the women racers themselves, and  the world cycling governing body, the UCI is (supposedly) looking into it. However, the wheels of change are turning very slowly.

 

It is good to hear this positive news and I hope it is the start of a turnaround in attitudes to prize money for women in sport.