the racing is good. I'm wondering why only 9 days ? Why can't we give the femmes at least 2 weeks ? Is there that lack of money ? lack of investment ? lack of fans ?
mixture of everything, the womens pro side of the sport is still growing, and getting used to increased budgets, actually paying riders decent wages, well some of them anyway, I think it was Mahé again this race who highlighted she gets just around the national minimum wage for her efforts, like she could work in a coffee shop and probably earn more.
races are building an audience and interest in them and getting better organisation helps, and hopefully investment and more coverage comes over time, but its always baby steps.
you expand a calendar or a race too quickly you can risk it all imploding horribly
take the British racing scene as case example, the womens side especially in the lead up to 2012, hit a peak, lots of races and sponsors and coverage till about 2016/18ish, everything seemed fine and then it all fell apart very quickly
races started losing money,costs rose alot, organisers started losing money too even as they tried to expand races, audience figures dropped, coverage became too costly to fund, without the sponsors who all suddenly decided to do something else with their money.
then you enter a death spiral thats hard to course correct. There are barely any UK womens road races in the calendar anymore, and we have the Tour of Britain Women only starting 2 weeks from now, no-ones talking about it are they ? which riders might be present ? or what coverage its likely to get? its a WWT event too. so some live coverage is part of the deal.
but it will lose money, though they report it generates a surplus somehow, guess its just fortunate perhaps its being run by an org that can absorb such approaches to accounting, as if it returned to a private company organiser they would go out of business very rapidly I suspect.
even the ASO struggled with the Tour de Yorkshire.
so baby steps, its great people are getting more and more interested in TdFFAZ. but you build it slowly you enable the sport to grow, not expand like a balloon with the inevitable bust that follows.
