Bavarianrider said:
How good are women's cyclist actually?
Normally in most Pro Sporst the best women are roughly as good as the best 16/17 year old guys, at best.
Is cycling any different?
Lupetto said:
Don't think so.
Remember Karsten Braasch? Highest ranking in ATP 38, he beat Serena and Venus Williams 6:1 and 6:2 with no problems at all.
Men and women sport on a professional level are two complete different worlds.
In cycling, there are few representative races. However, the Tour of California, and formerly Romandie, held ITTs over the same course, which allows us to judge a bit more accurately. Please note that while the Tour of California field for the men isn't super strong, the women's isn't either, with only a handful of top North American names participating. Nevertheless we get some good level pros at both.
2013 (31,6km):
Men's winner: Tejay van Garderen in 48'52
Women's winner: Evelyn Stevens in 55'49
= women's winner 14,22% slower than men's winner
2012 (29,7km):
Men's winner: Dave Zabriskie in 35'59
Women's winner: Kristin Armstrong in 39'59
= women's winner 11,12% slower than men's winner
2011 (24km)
Men's winner: Dave Zabriskie in 30'36
Women's winner: Kristin Armstrong in 34'29
= women's winner 12,69% slower than men's winner
I've only used the winner's times as the women's race is a standalone event and therefore there is no reason for them not to go all out, whereas many men racing as domestiques or domestic pros in the biggest race of their season may take it easy in the time trial to be fresh for working for teammates, or getting in breakaways, etc.
This places cycling around about the same area as you might expect.
At the 2012 Olympics, women swimmers were, on average, 10,1% slower than their male counterparts, while female track and field athletes' performances were on average 13,3% behind those of the men, but with the biggest disparities coming in field events (especially the pole vault, but with an underperforming Isinbayeva, who is clearly head and shoulders above her competition most of the time there, the disparity may be unrepresentatively large). At the 2010 Olympics female biathletes were 10,1% slower on the trails than the men, but on the harder Khanty-Mansiysk trails in the 2012 World Championships this increased to 13,3%, same as the track and field.
The same is borne out in the cycling, with the women's winner getting closest to their male counterpart on the flattest, most straightforward course (Bakersfield 2012), while losing more time and with the greatest disparity over the hillier, tougher 2013 course.
To extrapolate that, 10% slower than Tony Martin at the 2012 World Championships ITT would place the theoretical female athlete 49th, but only 35th in 2011 on the flatter København course, whereas 15% slower would place them 59th. However, that would be assuming that the women would be able to retain the same level of endurance as the men over the longer distance than the other compared events, which would only really be realistic if the women were able to race the same distances as the men on a regular basis - even in the biathlon and cross-country skiing (and track cycling for that matter) mentioned, the women race different distances to the men, so the 10-15% difference may tend upwards as distances are increased.
TheEnoculator said:
I gotta ask, how did women's tennis become so successful? Can Cycling follow a similar formula to promote women's cycling?
Almost all of the sports where women's competition is held in high regard are sports where both sexes participate as part of the same event. While the women's and men's tennis competitions have their own events, all the biggest events have both men's and women's competitions. Athletics has had men's and women's events as part of the same meet for a long time. Same goes for swimming. Most wintersports have both men's and women's competitions as part of the same events, and successful female competitors get every bit as much attention as their male counterparts. Obviously ski jumping and Nordic combined are exceptions here, but it holds for Alpine, Cross Country and biathlon, in all of which you could argue that the most successful women are as well known if not more well known than the men. There is much less opposition to women's races in track cycling, where they participate in the same meets as the men, than there is in road cycling. Maybe that's because events are faster and exciting, maybe that's because the reduced fields mask the lack of depth, maybe that's because track cycling is a very niche sport, I don't know.
But what I do know is that in sports where the women's game is better developed, the need to compare them to the men is less. The median skier in men's biathlon (I use biathlon as the example because I know more about it than, say, tennis, and unlike, say, XC skiing, there is a fairly comparable level of depth to the competition, whereas women's XC skiing is perhaps more like women's cycling in that there are only a handful of truly elite talents who win everything which can understandably lead to disinterested fans, even if the prestige factor is far in excess of that for women's cycling) last year skied around 25km/h, the fastest women's skiers are just over 23km/h. But people don't see the need to use this to devalue the achievements of a Neuner or a Berger, because women's biathlon is competitive enough that there is enough depth to judge them relative to their competition without recourse to the men's capabilities.
That simply doesn't exist in (road) cycling. There is not a strong enough audience for women's cycling to justify enough having been broadcast to allow people to have enough knowledge of the péloton to judge it on its own merits, and therefore the only recourse we have by means of judging the performance levels is to compare it to the better known men's events. And with a smaller péloton, with only a few real specialists, few races that enable specialisation and - let's be clear, this matters - less impressive visual presentation (sponsors, helicams, on-screen graphics, and yes, fans), it's no wonder that women's cycling comes off badly in that comparison in a way that women's tennis, skiing, athletics, swimming etc - which often appear in front of the same fans as the men's events - don't.
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