perhaps it gives a boost to women’s pro peloton to give the appellation “monument” to their races on similar courses. But I’m not sure that for growing women’s sports simply replicating all the images and traditions of the men’s sports is beneficial. Or perhaps I’m a stickler that “monument” at its core (and in the original French) typically implies a long history or legacy of something. Calling women’s Roubaix a monument kinda makes sense because racing on the pavement (even if not all sections) is the essential character and legacy of that race. Conversely, part of the central character and legacy of MSR is are?) its length. So a 150 km women’s race shouldn’t be called a monument—just call wherever-to-San Remo.
Yea, it also is a bit silly for me to give these races a monument title and not, say, Flèche, which at least had a women's race for a decade or two before the current expansion.
It's one of the things I'm most ambivalent about with the Women's World Tour, in that in some respects we're getting what I'd hoped for in that the women are slowly building up a calendar which matches up to that of the men, but what it has seen is all the passion project organisers who put on the races that kept women's cycling afloat during the 'racing through the dark' era being cast aside like used jet trash while the big name organisers who had held women's cycling back by their lack of interest (remembering the days of the best coverage of Flèche Wallonne being Sporza's commentators hanging their mobile phone out of the side of the commentary booth to post about 30 seconds of the riders' arrival on Twitter) rush to the front and yell 'follow me!'.
Whilst it's good not to have to rely on those underfunded organisations that often struggled with providing prize money and sponsorships and could see issues from other perspectives - security or parcours balance, for example - I do kinda regret that apart from Trofeo Binda, every single race from that era at the WWT level is gone. At least things like Emakumeen Bira have just been folded over into Itzulia Women, but things like Vårgårda, Drenthe (I know it also had a men's race, but the women's race was more important relative to calendar) and the Norwegian races are all gone, while the Ladies' Tour of Holland has been downgraded and the British Women's Tour has also died and is a phoenix, serving as a mere shadow of what it used to be. They might not have provided women's cycling with the kind of platform it needed to succeed, but at least you knew those organisers cared.
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