Re: Re:
laughingcavalier said:
This touches on what upsets me as much as doping about Sky and British Cycling: the systemic sexism that has led to them failing to support women's cycling over a prolonged period. That Cope says blithely that he had no real role but had the title of women's coach shows Sky still just don't see how inexcusable it is not just to fail to support the women's program but to siphon off funds from it to support the men's program. That he can't get the details right over seeing a recent world champion shows the contempt With which Nicole Cooke was treated by Sky and BC.
With trade teams driven by commercial priorities, one can almost understand claims they have to go where the money is (ie men's cycling). For a publicly funded program to do so is an insult to taxpayers. And for Sky to repeat that mistake when they came into sponsorship with a massive song and dance about how their support was not just elite but for cycling at all levels, shows disappointing myopia.
You raise a very good point. Cope was being paid by a publicly-funded national body, and being paid as a coach to women's cyclists in a national team. But he himself states that he had little to no real role and in fact did a large amount of his work ad hoc for a privately funded men's professional trade team, and seemingly despite being a women's coach seemingly didn't know the women's calendar well enough to know one of the most long-running and pre-eminent stage races. I've said for several years that the tangled web between British Cycling and Team Sky could bite them because while it enables them to more tightly circle the wagons, it does also mean that many people who have nothing to do with situations get dragged into it, and there is an extremely obvious conflict of interest. As you say, by using somebody whose salary is paid by a publicly-funded body and therefore
not by Team Sky as supplementary Team Sky staff, they are in fact extending the men's pro team's budget - at the expense of the women's team who obviously lose out from this, because part of the funding that goes to them goes toward Cope's salary, which is being used to support the men's pro team. Although prior to the beginning of the Sky Professional Cycling Team on the road you could see the likes of Hoy and Pendleton riding on the velodrome in black Sky-sponsored outfits, and despite much lip-service to cycling for all and at all levels, the beginnings of the team showcased once and for all the disparity.
The team spent a lot of money buying out contracts to get hold of Wiggins from the start of the team (plus also Ben Swift, though he wasn't a marquee signing as Wiggins was at the time), but there was no money for a women's team. I've brought this up several times and will probably continue to do so, but they could have had an entire Team Sky women's team for next to nothing in 2010, since Nicole Cooke's Nürnberger Versicherung team was about to go under when the new sponsors, Skyter Shipping, pulled out at the eleventh hour. The team owner and his son personally put the money up to keep the team going under the name Noris Cycling, but they couldn't afford former World Champions like Nicole Cooke and Amber Neben. For comparative peanuts, Sky could have plugged the funding gap and had a full women's cycling team led by a woman only one year removed from being both World and Olympic champion, plus a more than capable support squad with the likes of Worrack and Becker. All they needed to do was replace some of the younger German espoir riders with some young Britons, and you're sorted. But it was never going to happen. Cooke was too headstrong, too bolshy, had had much of her success despite, rather than because of, British Cycling, and of course is very outspoken and critical of the way the organization treated her over the years and had to swallow a lot of pride to ask for that support. They said no.
They were, however, interested in taking credit for her Olympic gold medal, which they proudly put at the front of Team Sky's new website at the team's launch, with the fact she wore a skinsuit in Beijing used as a prominent example of the glorious marginal gains mindset that Dave Brailsford had instilled in the riders, the mindset that was now coming to men's road cycling. The implied message was that without British Cycling's tactical masterstroke of providing the skinsuit, Nicole couldn't have done it, which is of course a gross oversimplification and I really don't think anybody could blame Cooke if she took that as an insult, especially as they were simultaneously ignoring her while she begged cap in hand for money to help her team out (for the record, British Cycling did in 2010 send a development team to several major races to back Nicole, but once she was back on a professional team in 2011 with MCipollini-Giambenina, the team that is now Alé-Cipollini, this support dried up again). If my memory serves me correctly, Sky did moot the possibility of a women's team again late in 2012, citing Armitstead's Olympic silver as a catalyst, but that was at the point where Cooke had announced her retirement and Pooley had signed up for a part-time contract with Bigla to enable her to finish her PhD after her second team in as many years had folded due to lack of funding. The timing was, shall we say, not the best. And then, just to put the cherry on top, a spokesman for British Cycling publicly declared Lizzie Armitstead's victory in Richmond as "a breakthrough moment for women's cycling in [the UK]" - when Pooley was a former TT World Champion only five years earlier, and seven years earlier Cooke had held both the Olympic and World titles simultaneously. Notwithstanding that while "the Yorkshire lass" as commentators seem insistent on calling her has been made into the team's golden girl on the road, Lizzie has demonstrated on a fair few occasions that she has many issues of her own with British Cycling, not least when she was very critical in the wake of the Shane Sutton allegations.
The poor treatment of top quality women's road riders by British Cycling is not a surprise, but to actually go to the extent of using their publicly-funded money from the women's team to finance operations for the privately-funded men's pro team which runs on a much higher budget anyway is something that raises many questions about morality and ethics anyway, even if there were no further questions to ask about Cope's travel packages or story inconsistencies. It's especially interesting for this to come to light at the time when they're having to investigate allegations of institutionalized sexism, which all of this would seem to support. And then, we discover that the enquiry into sexism at British Cycling hadn't even approached Pooley until the professional men's team decided to drag her in as a cover for their own fly-by-night package delivery service and she elected to approach them to make statements of her own volition. Maybe she could start with the fact they didn't solicit the opinion of one of the most prominent female pros in Britain for the last decade.
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