Re: Re:
Jspear said:
Scarponi said:
PremierAndrew said:
At least there's equal prize money for the men and women, it's something
I'll open a can of worms here but it shouldn't be equal. One gets a higher viewership and one has a demanding course. Tennis and cycling shouldn't have the same for the women imo
I agree (on cycling- can't speak to other sports...don't really watch them).
They shouldn't get paid as much because they don't bring as much to the table. Once they've reached the viewing numbers and are bringing their sponsors as much as the men, then salaries could be equaled.
Not picking on your comment specifically among the many echoing these sentiments, but just that it was the most recent.
The big problem with this line of argument is not the actual argument itself, i.e. that higher viewership numbers yield more value to sponsors, justifying higher prize money and salaries. It's that at present the coverage for the women is so limited that they are offered very limited opportunities to reach the full potential audience. Is that potential audience as high as that of men's cycling? Perhaps not. But when you only have limited opportunities to see races, and when you do it's seldom with the same slick, professional coverage of the men's race and usually in heavily edited form, it's naturally going to be hard for fans to form the same bond with the riders and teams, and become invested in them in the same way. The amount of effort sometimes required to stay up to date with women's cycling understandably turns a lot of potential fans away, fans who would be perfectly interested in the racing if it was made accessible to them. For the last several years we've found that, fairly universally, the women can put on a good racing show when given a course conducive to racing, and when they've put on dreadful shows, it's usually been on courses where the men's races were no good too.
Now, if, like with athletics, tennis, skiing (both Alpine and Nordic) and so on, the women's races and events got given coverage equivalent to the men with regularity (not just one-offs at the major events like the Worlds) and we had the same audience discrepancy, then that's one thing. But it's hard to judge the comparative audiences
fairly when a World Championships is held, because you're comparing riders that fans see on TV every weekend and often several weekdays for eight months of the year to riders who get that level of coverage two or three times a year, tops. It's hard to say "that in itself speaks volumes" unless the footage of the women had dwindled from a position of relative parity due to lack of interest; it simply hasn't grown to that level, although it must be said that professionalism in the péloton, depth and coverage is improving in recent years; however, it does remain at a position where for much of the season - including some very important races - only the dedicated will be able to put in the effort required to keep tracks of what's going on. It's hard to blame people whose interest is passive or casual for not going to the extents required to keep tabs on races that are difficult to follow and only watching the periodic major races that are broadcast in full, and consequently it's hard to blame them for only having a passing interest in the women's péloton, therefore they could watch attacks pinging all over the place, but without a frame of reference for what's a move to watch and what isn't, and riders that they have developed particular reasons to root for or against, it's hard to blame them for not becoming invested in it.
It's difficult because cycling is a kind of unique case in the sporting world when it comes to integrating the men's and women's races. A lot of events on closed circuits or fields are able to comfortably integrate the two genders' races, and we do see this in cyclocross and mountain biking too. Tentative steps made to this effect in women's road cycling have the issue that the men's events are often long-ingrained races with long histories and the women's races only have prestige by proxy because of conflation with the men's equivalent, but at the same time it's a lot easier to introduce a newcomer to women's cycling to who is who and their relevant achievements when those achievements are a known quantity; you don't need to know anything specific about women's cycling to know what winning Flèche Wallonne or de Ronde van Vlaanderen mean, whereas to the casual fan the Trofeo Binda or GP Vårgårda don't have the same immediacy despite being prestigious and established women's races. Creating a system akin to Nordic skiing or biathlon where the women do a World Cup type series of stage races and one-day races at the same time as the men has too many direct flaws - alternating the days of racing between the men and women as the snowsports often do would be a disaster for the concept of stage racing, while the point-to-point method of racing makes this harder logistically, as well as running the risk of killing off supportive long-term sponsors and races in favour of a facsimile of the men's calendar, or cheapening the men's races in distance or difficulty to make room for the women's events. Not to mention that, although that was the plan of the ProTour at its inception, a travelling circus of the same big stars doing all the big races à la F1 is not possible in cycling because of the wild variations in courses and who they suit, plus the various smaller races that need propping up with star power on the national scenes, and so on.
Cycling more closely resembles sportscars, where the FIA controls the regulations, but have to regularly jump to ACO's tune, because ACO owns the 24h du Mans, which is more important than the rest of the calendar, and there are other nationally-focused series running their own rules which are often only partially homologous with FIA's or ACO's. Teams that run the 24h don't always run full FIA series elsewhere, but instead can pop up to compete in chosen events in other series. This makes a fully integrated men's/women's calendar very difficult to envisage in the near or medium-term future in cycling.
The alternative may then be to have a separate organizing body from the UCI, or at the very least a separate working group within the UCI. Some of the sports where the women's events are most well-regarded are ones where an independent governing body for the women's sport has worked hard to establish its own events. Golf is a good example, for the LGA spent many years working tirelessly to build up the sport, and this gives perhaps a good indication of a sport where the women's events have built up their own prestige. Tennis is an interesting hybrid, where there are standalone women's events (which have their own audience and coverage) as well as the integrated events including all of the majors, with both men's and women's competitions. That may be the most reasonable goal for women's cycling, but obviously to this day the same arguments regarding salaries, exposure and value continue to periodically raise their heads in women's tennis, which has a much longer history of comparative equality than women's cycling.
The thing is, we're at a difficult crossroads with women's cycling. The authorities that count are in an awkward position at the moment. There's too much tentative prodding in the direction of equality, too much half-hearted notions of promotion, for it to really take hold. What good is ASO producing a one-day race that allows the women to be filmed going back and forth on the Champs Elysées to creating new fans, if there's only a 20-minute highlight show for the Giro stage when the best young rider attacked 70km and three mountains from home and the maglia rosa set off 50km out to join her with the 2nd place on GC in hot pursuit? What's more likely to excite fans, seeing a flat bunch kick finish but with a large crowd of people clapping politely, or 2 hours of continual action in a mountain stage? What good is ASO moving that one-day race into midweek to give the women a chance to climb a mythical mountain if it threatens to kill off a long-established 7 day stage race? The UCI needs to decide, do they want to push women's cycling to grow under their tutelage, or do they want it to grow independently of them, which may entail passing over responsibility for administering the sport to an either independent or affiliated women's cycling organization along the lines of the LPGA or WTA? If they want it to grow under their tutelage, they need to make firmer demands of organizers and broadcasters to ensure that sufficient coverage is given, not just to the crappy pseudo-crits but to the more interesting races, to give the women's races a chance to take root with the audience, and
then judge where its marketing and viewership potential lies once the opportunities have been there.