Lizzie has said a fair bit in the last few months that isn't wholly complimentary about British Cycling and its management, but her words carry quite significant weight here. The reason being, Lizzie is one of BC's chosen ones. The one they tried to rewrite history around, the one they marginalized Cooke and Pooley for the benefit of. They pretended Nicole hadn't won Olympic or World championships gold in order to present Armitstead as a kind of pioneer after Richmond.
Varnish was on her way out of the team and that was how it all began. Houvenaghel was dropped by the team and so the inner circle and the fans can dismiss her claims as motivated by that. Likewise Pooley, and especially Nicole Cooke, who is admittedly a forthright and potentially abrasive personality but who got stepped over, stepped on and held back every step of her way by British Cycling. The number of accounts - plus the fact that BC's mistreatment of Cooke and Pooley (and to a lesser extent Houvenaghel) was hardly secret, just that it went even further than we thought - meant we got a clear picture of what was going on. But as long as it was people who could be spun as having an axe to grind, there would be ammunition to dismiss their misgivings. Even if, as Nicole did, they presented their case formally in front of a select panel, with specific time and date anecdotes and supporting documentary evidence.
But with Lizzie, that's not possible. She has had the most outwardly visible support from BC of anybody in the women's road team. They helped her fund her case to get off the ban for the missed tests, they threw out the team's self-penned book of tactics at the eleventh hour to focus on a new unrehearsed plan entirely based on Lizzie (and placed all the blame on Nicole when it didn't work), they focus each and every major national team road race around her (to the extent that, with the Rio road race known to be one of the most mountainous women's one day races in years, the very first thing that Sutton said about Emma Pooley - arguably the greatest climber of her generation among women (mainly as she's more consistent and versatile than Abbott, however in the long one-off climbs Mara tended to get the better of her, however Mara always struggled with one-day races while Emma had much more race smarts and more than the one weapon) - returning from retirement was that it was good because "she'll add more strong legs to support Lizzie", because the idea of racing for anybody else didn't even cross his mind once).
What I'm getting at is not intended as another dig at Lizzie but to illustrate, she's a person of precisely the kind of position and status who, among the men's team, have been coming out saying things along the lines of "I never saw any such thing. They were always great to me". One of those who's benefited most from the culture at BC. She's protected the names of the people involved so it can't be considered axe-grinding, and as somebody who has been so prominent in the British Cycling revolution PR she can't be considered an outsider, embittered, or attention-seeking, and so her words cannot be dismissed as such, even by the most ardently defensive pro-British Cycling Betonköpfe.
And yet she's not going the same way as the likes of Thomas and Wiggins of defending the team. She's joining the chorus of critics, who are sharing stories of a pretty horrible culture for anybody to be in, let alone for a young woman. She may not have the litany of specific events and occurrences that Nicole had in her presentation to the select committee to show the mistreatment of the women's team, but the story she relates is thoroughly unpleasant - as a 19-year-old effective neo-pro at the time, it reeks of the worst combination of sports cultures - the incident may come across to some as relatively minor, but it still suggests both rookie-hazing and casual sexism, treating a young member of the women's team as a toy for their own amusement. The other question that it raises is, Armitstead was the only woman in the room with the whole men's team, and had been woken up to participate. So why was only one woman awoken, and why Lizzie? Had they tried to wake up others on this particular night, but Lizzie was the only one who didn't feel able to tell them to go away? Were they singling her out for this treatment? Or were similar things happening on other nights to other members of the women's team, being forced into outwardly-innocent yet uncomfortable control situations alone among numerous men who thought nothing of treating the young female riders as a plaything? None of the answers that can be given will be pleasant.
Varnish was on her way out of the team and that was how it all began. Houvenaghel was dropped by the team and so the inner circle and the fans can dismiss her claims as motivated by that. Likewise Pooley, and especially Nicole Cooke, who is admittedly a forthright and potentially abrasive personality but who got stepped over, stepped on and held back every step of her way by British Cycling. The number of accounts - plus the fact that BC's mistreatment of Cooke and Pooley (and to a lesser extent Houvenaghel) was hardly secret, just that it went even further than we thought - meant we got a clear picture of what was going on. But as long as it was people who could be spun as having an axe to grind, there would be ammunition to dismiss their misgivings. Even if, as Nicole did, they presented their case formally in front of a select panel, with specific time and date anecdotes and supporting documentary evidence.
But with Lizzie, that's not possible. She has had the most outwardly visible support from BC of anybody in the women's road team. They helped her fund her case to get off the ban for the missed tests, they threw out the team's self-penned book of tactics at the eleventh hour to focus on a new unrehearsed plan entirely based on Lizzie (and placed all the blame on Nicole when it didn't work), they focus each and every major national team road race around her (to the extent that, with the Rio road race known to be one of the most mountainous women's one day races in years, the very first thing that Sutton said about Emma Pooley - arguably the greatest climber of her generation among women (mainly as she's more consistent and versatile than Abbott, however in the long one-off climbs Mara tended to get the better of her, however Mara always struggled with one-day races while Emma had much more race smarts and more than the one weapon) - returning from retirement was that it was good because "she'll add more strong legs to support Lizzie", because the idea of racing for anybody else didn't even cross his mind once).
What I'm getting at is not intended as another dig at Lizzie but to illustrate, she's a person of precisely the kind of position and status who, among the men's team, have been coming out saying things along the lines of "I never saw any such thing. They were always great to me". One of those who's benefited most from the culture at BC. She's protected the names of the people involved so it can't be considered axe-grinding, and as somebody who has been so prominent in the British Cycling revolution PR she can't be considered an outsider, embittered, or attention-seeking, and so her words cannot be dismissed as such, even by the most ardently defensive pro-British Cycling Betonköpfe.
And yet she's not going the same way as the likes of Thomas and Wiggins of defending the team. She's joining the chorus of critics, who are sharing stories of a pretty horrible culture for anybody to be in, let alone for a young woman. She may not have the litany of specific events and occurrences that Nicole had in her presentation to the select committee to show the mistreatment of the women's team, but the story she relates is thoroughly unpleasant - as a 19-year-old effective neo-pro at the time, it reeks of the worst combination of sports cultures - the incident may come across to some as relatively minor, but it still suggests both rookie-hazing and casual sexism, treating a young member of the women's team as a toy for their own amusement. The other question that it raises is, Armitstead was the only woman in the room with the whole men's team, and had been woken up to participate. So why was only one woman awoken, and why Lizzie? Had they tried to wake up others on this particular night, but Lizzie was the only one who didn't feel able to tell them to go away? Were they singling her out for this treatment? Or were similar things happening on other nights to other members of the women's team, being forced into outwardly-innocent yet uncomfortable control situations alone among numerous men who thought nothing of treating the young female riders as a plaything? None of the answers that can be given will be pleasant.
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