Notwithstanding that if men's races continue to marginalize endurance to a stupid degree, then before long the women's races and men's races will be the same length anyway,
here's a post I did over 5 years ago which illustrates that even if you DID want to make the argument that the physical capabilities of men and women mean that women should have a shorter distance race, the difference is in fact only 10-15%, tending higher as altitude gain during the race increases. I also used cross-sport references to swimming, cross-country skiing and biathlon and found comparative equivalence in this difference between men and women, therefore if you wanted to use the "equivalent length of races in time rather than distance" argument, as they do in, say, biathlon, the differences need not be as big as they are (indeed in biathlon the differences in distance are 25% in sprint and individual, 20% in relay and pursuit and 16.7% in mass start, much less than the differences in cycling which tend toward 40% or, in the case of some classics, even more).
The other argument is that the women should at least get equivalence of course. By and large in recent years, when presented with a course that the men produced a good race on, the women have also produced a good race, and when the men have produced a bad race, the women have also done so. However, as was argued in
Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig's Voxwomen piece, this depends on equivalence of course. The women did not get to do the section of racing in the desert in Doha, which provided all of the selective moments of the race, and in Innsbruck they will not be allowed to do the climb in the ITT nor the all-important Gramartboden climb that has attracted all of the pre-race attention. In Bergen, there was no Fløyen climb at the end of the women's TT.
I'm not saying that the women should necessarily be racing 260km - not
now at least, it would be far too much of an outlier, but I don't see why, as distance in women's races is gradually increasing, parity of distance should not be a viable goal - a comparison would be when the Vasaloppet was part of the XC Skiing World Cup - all of the distance specialist women chose not to enter the 45km women's race (a 50% reduction in distance on the true Vasaloppet) and instead participate in the non-World-Cup real Vasaloppet over it's proper 90km distance, leaving the men to fight among the marathon specialists, but the women to race a reduced field on their own because their marathon specialists were not interested in a surrogate half-distance race.
However, the women DO deserve the chance to race on equivalent parcours. We've just seen them climb Monte Zoncolan, with Annemiek van Vleuten setting a time that would have put her in the top 40 in the men's Giro stage that Froome won two months earlier. They're capable of climbing Gramartboden and they deserve to have the opportunity to show that women's cycling can be exciting and interesting and be worth watching - we watch an awful lot of absolute garbage men's races during the year, so the quality of the racing is only a case against women's cycling if the women aren't given a fair opportunity to showcase what they can do, because they have produced some excellent racing at times in the last few years. The Rio road race was spectacular, the 2016 Giro had a mountain stage where the top 2 on GC attacked on the penultimate climb 50km from home and rode across to the best young rider who had gone solo from the first climb of the day, the Emakumeen Bira last year saw a climbing exhibition from Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio that derailed a three-pronged Orica assault that had been dominating the race in one go, La Course saw solo assaults from 40km from home of the kind nobody showed in the Tour de France and featured one of the most tense chasedowns we've seen in years culminating in a last-second shock, and nearly every year at La Flèche Wallonne there are attacks in the women's race
before the Mur de Huy. In the words of Cille, when Kasper Asgreen raised the query that maybe by producing different routes, the objective was to prevent one of the big hurdles that women's road cycling faces - that, paradoxically unlike sports where the women are competing in the same events, like athletics, the women get compared
more to the men in road cycling and not treated as the best within their own field like track cyclists, cyclocrossers and MTB riders to a greater extent are - "The point is not that we want to be measured against the men. The point is that I want our routes to be as exciting as the men’s routes." So long as the most anticipated obstacles of the events are being withheld from the women, whether it be actively patronising the women by suggesting they can't do it or misguidedly trying to build up suspense for the men's race by not unveiling the big challenge until the elite men take it on (thus inherently harming the prestige of the other races, including the elite women, by implicitly stating that these are all lesser competitions - we know that the elite men is the main event in such championships, but we don't need to implicitly state that they are the only ones worthy of the biggest challenges - that is risible enough with the U23s, but at least they have the excuse that they are the espoirs, and they can aspire to the Elites in future; the women do not have that opportunity to "graduate" to the harder parcours and therefore we are left with the implication that the UCI consider women are not worthy of taking on the toughest and most anticipated challenges).
Cille isn't the first pro woman to raise these concerns either. In 2015 Emma Johansson criticised the Women's Tour, saying that while the organisation and the fan reception was top notch, unless they could produce some parcours that enabled the riders more opportunity to make the race she wouldn't return (the organisers duly obliged with a much more interesting 2016 route, for the record); in 2017 Annemiek van Vleuten criticised the much less mountainous route, saying that the route had not been conducive enough to attacking riding. The women are actively clamouring for harder, more selective races that they can showcase themselves and their sport in. Sure, the TV audience may be limited compared to the men's right now, but they want the opportunity to give the audience a reason to care and to tune back in because it gives them more chance to provide entertaining racing, it gives TV companies the better opportunity to sell the race to a larger audience, and it gives sponsors more of a reason to invest, and makes more money for the organisers - a win-win, you'd think. Wouldn't you?
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