-
The Cycling News forum is looking to add some volunteer moderators with Red Rick's recent retirement. If you're interested in helping keep our discussions on track, send a direct message to
In the meanwhile, please use the Report option if you see a post that doesn't fit within the forum rules.
Thanks!
Hard times being chauvinistic and a sexist nowadays. Unless you're Donald Trump of course!
Poor Pete Pete!
Poor Pete Pete!
Kennaugh was very careless here. It's hard to see him becoming a huge, global star with big sponsoring contracts now.
Re: Re:
...and how exactly would the athletes themselves go about doing that? Their responsibility is to train and prepare to the best of their abilities to compete. Women especially have little influence over the structure of the events.
saganftw said:
...and how exactly would the athletes themselves go about doing that? Their responsibility is to train and prepare to the best of their abilities to compete. Women especially have little influence over the structure of the events.
Singer01
BANNED
Re: Re:
nonsense, the tour de france is often the least interesting race of the year, it probably gets more viewers than all other cycling combined.
PK has a point, however he has come across as a right *** the way he has articulated it.
saganftw said:
nonsense, the tour de france is often the least interesting race of the year, it probably gets more viewers than all other cycling combined.
PK has a point, however he has come across as a right *** the way he has articulated it.
Like hrotha said, let's just compare Peter Kennuagh with Emma Pooley and Nicole Cooke. Not many people outside of cycling have heard of Kennaugh. However, most big sports fans have heard of both Pooley and Cooke. There is no reason why SKY shouldn't invest a small amount of money, ofc not as much as into the men's, into women's cycling. It is inexcusable, however, that British Cycling give preferential treatment to a group of men who will never win a gold at the road race at the Olympics to the women who will and have. BC should care about gold medals, not sponsors and money.
The level of interest in, and therefore money in, professional sports are (theoretically) in market equilibrium. Somehow favouring one group over another makes little sense. And at the end of the day we are talking about a vanishingly small number of people who are paid to ride their bikes, or who are getting a tax-payer funded holiday in Rio. We should care more about promoting participation in cycling as an activity, with interest in cycling as a sport being driven bottom-up. Advocacy and the resulting cycling facilities, not more professional athletes (regardless of sex), are the key to cycling being a thriving activity with a healthy competitive scene for those so-inclined.
(Oh, and this guy should have kept his mouth shut. He achieved nothing)
(Oh, and this guy should have kept his mouth shut. He achieved nothing)
Re: Re:
Aren't the women way more successful as far as bringing home medals on the road. Also, unlike the men they are actually born and grew up in the UK, they didn't just happen to be born in some foreign country to women who were born in the UK.MartinGT said:
Re: Re:
No, BC care about male gold medals. Their clear neglection shows of Pooley and Cooke shows that for them a female gold is just an added bonus. They don't care. Take the 2012 olympics. They gave every single male rider in the road race team and reserves a special bike made by McLaren, but none of the women got that, despite having more chance of winning a gold and the defending champion.
MartinGT said:
No, BC care about male gold medals. Their clear neglection shows of Pooley and Cooke shows that for them a female gold is just an added bonus. They don't care. Take the 2012 olympics. They gave every single male rider in the road race team and reserves a special bike made by McLaren, but none of the women got that, despite having more chance of winning a gold and the defending champion.
Re: Re:
PK was obviously a complete idiot as he has admitted.
I am not sure it is completely fair to say the women had a better chance of winning Gold, had it come down to a bunch sprint in the men's race Britain had the favorite
Having said that, it would be great for Sky to sponsor a women's team, I think there would actually be quite an interest in the UK.
Brullnux said:
PK was obviously a complete idiot as he has admitted.
I am not sure it is completely fair to say the women had a better chance of winning Gold, had it come down to a bunch sprint in the men's race Britain had the favorite
Having said that, it would be great for Sky to sponsor a women's team, I think there would actually be quite an interest in the UK.
Actually he just said the truth. Nice one. One might not agree with him, but it's always nice to see someone with a point and a meaning nowadays when everybody just tells what peepz wanna hear. Respect.
Re: Re:
But there wasn't a high chance of it coming down to a group sprint, especially the way GB rode it. i agree with the fact SKY should sponsor a women's team. It would for sure have success.
No, he said his opinion. There is no truth here, only subjective 'truths', which are opinions in disguise. I think it is wrong, completely and utterly, but it is my opinion. I do believe it to be true, but I understand it is subjective.
del1962 said:
But there wasn't a high chance of it coming down to a group sprint, especially the way GB rode it. i agree with the fact SKY should sponsor a women's team. It would for sure have success.
staubsauger said:
No, he said his opinion. There is no truth here, only subjective 'truths', which are opinions in disguise. I think it is wrong, completely and utterly, but it is my opinion. I do believe it to be true, but I understand it is subjective.
Re: Re:
Nativism?? I'm in the US. I was just stating a fact. People seem to be all about that when they when they are supportive of Kennaugh or Sutton.TMP402 said:
Emma (and Nicole for that matter) made their name at a time prior to the explosion of cycling in the UK. They were kind of outsiders to a great extent, although in Nicole's case they did get the Halford's set-up for a bit, but once Nicole got that gold medal, boom, all gone. The team disappeared, announcing (almost in these words) "mission accomplished", leaving the reigning World and Olympic champion without a ride. Ludicrous, but with the Olympic cycle, sadly not that unusual in women's cycling, given that the Olympics are one of the few times the women get a full televising of their races. It has always struck me that BC are a little distrustful of those who were already established (especially if they'd established themselves despite BC), perhaps as less likely to stay on-message, perhaps as untrustworthy as they haven't overseen their development to the same extent, I don't know. But either way, it does feel like Pooley has come out with a few of these kind of quotes (and this is one of the few self-aggrandizing ones I've ever seen from her) which are more designed to draw some attention to the fact that, hey, women race bikes on the road too, you know, than anything else.
I also see nothing wrong with what she said. Remember that, at the time Team Sky was set up, Emma rode for Cervélo Test Team. When they set up, the men and women were both part of the same launch, both given time to shine, and the team were very good at ensuring that fans knew from their press about the successes of Emma and Claudia Häusler just as much as they did about Sastre and Hushovd and the like (although of course given the much greater exposure elsewhere, nobody is going to claim the women were stars of equal standing in the wider world). It's not like Cervélo's men's team suffered for the money put into the women's team, which required a much lower budget of course. To this day, there are several teams that have women's equivalents, whether direct (Lotto-Soudal, TopSport Vlaanderen, United Healthcare), indirect (Giant-Alpecin and Liv-Plantur) or formerly linked teams that have divorced from their men's team (Rabo, Alé-Cipollini). With the budget Sky have, a women's team could be run on a pittance, with little effect on the men's budget. Now, if they argued "we would need more money than that to produce a top level team, and we're only interested in it if we can be certain we will be winning", that's one thing, but one thing that isn't mentioned in it, is they could have had a top level women's team, and they could have had it for a pittance too. At the end of 2009, Nicole Cooke's Vision-1 team went under and she signed for the Nürnberger Versicherung team, an established German squad with a few top level names. The new sponsors, a Luxembourg-based luxury yacht firm called Skyter Shipping, pulled out at the eleventh hour leaving the team stranded and scrabbling around for any money they could to keep the team going. At the same time as Dave Brailsford was pulling out all the stops for the massively overblown Sky launch with the faux-James Bond aesthetic, a woman one year removed from the World Championship was begging cap in hand for money to keep the team afloat... and was turned down flat. At the same time as the Sky website was awash with tales of how Dave Brailsford won Nicole Cooke that World Championships because she wore a skinsuit. It was downright insulting.
That proposed 2010 Skyter team was pretty useful too. Alongside Nicole they also had Amber Neben, Trixi Worrack, Charlotte Becker and Lisa Brennauer. They could have replaced some of the young and inexperienced Germans with the young and inexperienced Britons they sent to the reduced calendar Cooke ended up doing. Instead, they decided it would be a good time to start talking about a women's Team Sky a few years down the line, to capitalise on Armitstead's success (which British Cycling heralded as a "breakthrough" despite her not having achieved anything Cooke hadn't done less than a decade earlier - and notwithstanding that Lizzie herself has not exactly been painting British Cycling in the best of lights either, and they've seemed much more supportive of her and willing to piggyback her than they ever seemed with Nicole or Emma) - at the point where Cooke had retired and Pooley was on a part-time contract. Further evidence of the esteem women's road cycling is held in can be seen in the Olympic Legacy program, which has led to a pretty decent .1 (now .HC) men's race out into the Surrey Hills and back; the women put on a pretty great show on the Olympic course with the British women being amongst the most active and coming away with a well-deserved silver medal, so of course the perfect way to capitalise on this would be to have a one-hour crit to keep the crowds in the city centre busy while the men are doing the "real" racing. Granted, this kind of token gesture for the women only matches what the Tour and Vuelta have done, but I've been pretty critical of those races as well as ASO doing the bare minimum they could get away with, producing an inevitably insipid, pan-flat affair, saying "look, the women get to race in front of a large crowd" then congratulating themselves for being so supportive of women's cycling.
Pooley's point about medals is absolutely a good one. At the end of the day, much of cycling to this day has little currency in the UK in terms of instantly recognizable achievements. Certainly the knowledge of the sport is much greater now than it had been a few years ago, but at the time they were setting out, achievements with recognizable currency boiled down to three things:
- Olympic medals
- World championships
- Tour de France.
There are vastly (vastly) more medals available on the track owing to the different number of disciplines, and the Tour de France does not have a women's equivalent. In addition to this, road racing has a much deeper field of competition. One day racing is inherently much harder to control than stage racing, where if you have the strongest rider in the race and a good backup squad, the bludgeoning tactic used so effectively by Team Sky is much harder to beat. The opportunity, as BC saw it, to profit by way of tangible achievements recognized by everyone, was comparatively limited in women's road cycling even before we get to the characters involved.
And that's before we get to the exposure levels. I've said my piece, now countless times, on the "women's cycling is boring" argument, but in Cliff's Notes version: so is men's cycling. Lots of artificial "break of the day" action in flat stages, but because we know who the participants are and we care, we can discuss what might happen at greater length, and also because of greater variety of course and greater depth in the péloton, the cast is more different day-on-day than women's cycling; in recent years we've seen the women provide an exciting show on the courses that the men were able to, and when the women have provided a dismal spectacle the men's races haven't been much better. But the question must then be, to Peter Kennaugh, he's won races like the Österreich Rundfahrt and the Settimana Coppi e Bartali, what coverage do they get? Coverage is not the only validation of an achievement. But how many people back in Britain give a flying one that Kennaugh has won those races? Very few, I'd wager. And if British interest in the sport increasing has meant that fans are more aware of races other than the Tour (and all the better for it), why couldn't the same also be true of the women's races? After all, the Aviva Women's Tour has been one of the bigger successes in women's cycling in recent years, with excellent TV coverage and crowds far in excess of those you see at many women's races. Women's cycling in many markets simply hasn't been given the chance to see whether it could catch on, saying nobody cares therefore they don't deserve to be given the attention is counter-intuitive. Nobody in Britain cared about track cycling until they isolated it as a sport with a lot of potential to boost medal counts. And I'd still put money that more people in Britain know and recognize Pendleton than Froome anyway.
I also see nothing wrong with what she said. Remember that, at the time Team Sky was set up, Emma rode for Cervélo Test Team. When they set up, the men and women were both part of the same launch, both given time to shine, and the team were very good at ensuring that fans knew from their press about the successes of Emma and Claudia Häusler just as much as they did about Sastre and Hushovd and the like (although of course given the much greater exposure elsewhere, nobody is going to claim the women were stars of equal standing in the wider world). It's not like Cervélo's men's team suffered for the money put into the women's team, which required a much lower budget of course. To this day, there are several teams that have women's equivalents, whether direct (Lotto-Soudal, TopSport Vlaanderen, United Healthcare), indirect (Giant-Alpecin and Liv-Plantur) or formerly linked teams that have divorced from their men's team (Rabo, Alé-Cipollini). With the budget Sky have, a women's team could be run on a pittance, with little effect on the men's budget. Now, if they argued "we would need more money than that to produce a top level team, and we're only interested in it if we can be certain we will be winning", that's one thing, but one thing that isn't mentioned in it, is they could have had a top level women's team, and they could have had it for a pittance too. At the end of 2009, Nicole Cooke's Vision-1 team went under and she signed for the Nürnberger Versicherung team, an established German squad with a few top level names. The new sponsors, a Luxembourg-based luxury yacht firm called Skyter Shipping, pulled out at the eleventh hour leaving the team stranded and scrabbling around for any money they could to keep the team going. At the same time as Dave Brailsford was pulling out all the stops for the massively overblown Sky launch with the faux-James Bond aesthetic, a woman one year removed from the World Championship was begging cap in hand for money to keep the team afloat... and was turned down flat. At the same time as the Sky website was awash with tales of how Dave Brailsford won Nicole Cooke that World Championships because she wore a skinsuit. It was downright insulting.
That proposed 2010 Skyter team was pretty useful too. Alongside Nicole they also had Amber Neben, Trixi Worrack, Charlotte Becker and Lisa Brennauer. They could have replaced some of the young and inexperienced Germans with the young and inexperienced Britons they sent to the reduced calendar Cooke ended up doing. Instead, they decided it would be a good time to start talking about a women's Team Sky a few years down the line, to capitalise on Armitstead's success (which British Cycling heralded as a "breakthrough" despite her not having achieved anything Cooke hadn't done less than a decade earlier - and notwithstanding that Lizzie herself has not exactly been painting British Cycling in the best of lights either, and they've seemed much more supportive of her and willing to piggyback her than they ever seemed with Nicole or Emma) - at the point where Cooke had retired and Pooley was on a part-time contract. Further evidence of the esteem women's road cycling is held in can be seen in the Olympic Legacy program, which has led to a pretty decent .1 (now .HC) men's race out into the Surrey Hills and back; the women put on a pretty great show on the Olympic course with the British women being amongst the most active and coming away with a well-deserved silver medal, so of course the perfect way to capitalise on this would be to have a one-hour crit to keep the crowds in the city centre busy while the men are doing the "real" racing. Granted, this kind of token gesture for the women only matches what the Tour and Vuelta have done, but I've been pretty critical of those races as well as ASO doing the bare minimum they could get away with, producing an inevitably insipid, pan-flat affair, saying "look, the women get to race in front of a large crowd" then congratulating themselves for being so supportive of women's cycling.
Pooley's point about medals is absolutely a good one. At the end of the day, much of cycling to this day has little currency in the UK in terms of instantly recognizable achievements. Certainly the knowledge of the sport is much greater now than it had been a few years ago, but at the time they were setting out, achievements with recognizable currency boiled down to three things:
- Olympic medals
- World championships
- Tour de France.
There are vastly (vastly) more medals available on the track owing to the different number of disciplines, and the Tour de France does not have a women's equivalent. In addition to this, road racing has a much deeper field of competition. One day racing is inherently much harder to control than stage racing, where if you have the strongest rider in the race and a good backup squad, the bludgeoning tactic used so effectively by Team Sky is much harder to beat. The opportunity, as BC saw it, to profit by way of tangible achievements recognized by everyone, was comparatively limited in women's road cycling even before we get to the characters involved.
And that's before we get to the exposure levels. I've said my piece, now countless times, on the "women's cycling is boring" argument, but in Cliff's Notes version: so is men's cycling. Lots of artificial "break of the day" action in flat stages, but because we know who the participants are and we care, we can discuss what might happen at greater length, and also because of greater variety of course and greater depth in the péloton, the cast is more different day-on-day than women's cycling; in recent years we've seen the women provide an exciting show on the courses that the men were able to, and when the women have provided a dismal spectacle the men's races haven't been much better. But the question must then be, to Peter Kennaugh, he's won races like the Österreich Rundfahrt and the Settimana Coppi e Bartali, what coverage do they get? Coverage is not the only validation of an achievement. But how many people back in Britain give a flying one that Kennaugh has won those races? Very few, I'd wager. And if British interest in the sport increasing has meant that fans are more aware of races other than the Tour (and all the better for it), why couldn't the same also be true of the women's races? After all, the Aviva Women's Tour has been one of the bigger successes in women's cycling in recent years, with excellent TV coverage and crowds far in excess of those you see at many women's races. Women's cycling in many markets simply hasn't been given the chance to see whether it could catch on, saying nobody cares therefore they don't deserve to be given the attention is counter-intuitive. Nobody in Britain cared about track cycling until they isolated it as a sport with a lot of potential to boost medal counts. And I'd still put money that more people in Britain know and recognize Pendleton than Froome anyway.
i dont think anybody disagrees with the idea that womens cycling should get a bigger exposure,the problem is how it was presented in the media - basically with connection to sexism allegations and imediately followed by article about pooleys remarks they made it look like SKY doesnt have a womens team because they are sexist which to anyone who knows corporate folks is laughable,if they could sell salted raccoons a**holes on a stick they would sell it in 5 flavours,money knows no gender
right now,only way to support womens cycling is because you actually care,not because you expect return and in todays world only very few can afford long term investments,short term is the name of the game,what can you do for me today not in 10 years
right now,only way to support womens cycling is because you actually care,not because you expect return and in todays world only very few can afford long term investments,short term is the name of the game,what can you do for me today not in 10 years
Re:
Agreed, Pooley's comments are irrelevant to the initial issue which was the allegation of institutionalised sexism at British Cycling which is distinct from sponsorship/money/exposure going into womens cycling per se.
Having said that Kennaugh should know that in the Murdoch owned empire that pays his wages each month "off piste" twitter comments amidst a growing media storm are a no no for old Rupert.
Its pretty comical how riders at the behest of the Murdochs are swiftly gagged for having an opinion - he'll probably be riding for Raleigh next year............
saganftw said:
Agreed, Pooley's comments are irrelevant to the initial issue which was the allegation of institutionalised sexism at British Cycling which is distinct from sponsorship/money/exposure going into womens cycling per se.
Having said that Kennaugh should know that in the Murdoch owned empire that pays his wages each month "off piste" twitter comments amidst a growing media storm are a no no for old Rupert.
Its pretty comical how riders at the behest of the Murdochs are swiftly gagged for having an opinion - he'll probably be riding for Raleigh next year............
Re: Re:
Seems reasonable enough.
JRanton said:Billie said:When I saw the Kennaugh thread this high I for sure thought it would be about this:
Nothing he's said there is wrong. There is generally very little interest in women's sport I'm afraid. And as for the women's Giro there is hardly any interest in the men's Giro in the UK so why would a major sponsor be interested in the women's version?
Seems reasonable enough.
Nice win today,a sprint one vs Swift would have been even greater.Training for Suisse but winning on Alpe d'Huez in Dauphine must be a great feeling.
Hopefully he'll get a spot in the TDF team.
Decent words after the stage,no material for the haters this time :http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/kennaugh-bolsters-tour-de-france-selection-hopes-with-dauphine-win/
Hopefully he'll get a spot in the TDF team.
Decent words after the stage,no material for the haters this time :http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/kennaugh-bolsters-tour-de-france-selection-hopes-with-dauphine-win/
He gets a lot of heat for hil personality, but on the bike he's a great rider, he deserved that big win.
Still, he looks like a middleschool boy when you see him in person, probably the biggest babyface in the peloton.
Still, he looks like a middleschool boy when you see him in person, probably the biggest babyface in the peloton.
TRENDING THREADS
-
Liege Bastogne Liege-7 hour monument, Sunday, April 21, 2024- Started by topcat
- Replies: 978
-
-
Paris - Roubaix 2024, one day monument, April 7- Started by Dreginald
- Replies: 2K
-
-
-
Volta Ciclista a Catalunya 2024 (March 18-24)- Started by Devil's Elbow
- Replies: 2K
-
De Ronde van Vlaanderen (270.8 km), 2024 March 31 (Sunday)- Started by Netserk
- Replies: 1K
Latest posts
-
-
77th Tour de Romandie (2.UWT) // 23rd - 28th of April 2024- Latest: Samu Cuenca
-
-
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram