Peter van der Veen on Amstel Gold and the new WWT calendar.
An excellent read which concurs with many of my concerns about the direction of development. He also points out that along with the Emakumeen Bira, the same fate has befallen Dwars door de Westhoek; the Omloop van Borsele (and its attached non-UCI but nevertheless prestigious Borsele ITT, one of the few European standalone TT events of any great length for women) will need to move to Saturday to make room for LBL, and the Omloop van de IJsseldelta and Ronde van Gelderland are both Dutch races that need to move midweek to make space for AGR as well. Some of the key quotes:
"Suddenly [when Boels became a sponsor] Van Vliet said a women’s AGR is possible and all issues have been solved. Personally this gives me reason to doubts to how long this race will be on the calendar when Boels quits their sponsoring."
"If AGR disappears in a few years it will have done more damage than good for the sport"
The key section in my opinion is this:
"What the sport needs is a extensive calendar, and not a WWT-only calendar where women ride in advance of the men’s race to warm the crowd. There is a limit to the number of WWT races we can have at this moment. Calling for every big men’s race to have a women’s race too is not helping in my opinion. The strength of women’s cycling is also measured in the capabilities of having their own Classic races. I personally would call it a weakness if every women’s race is just a copy of the men’s race. Secondlym in the end some the current new WWT races will be moved to a lower level and because these new races are only interested in economic value they might not want to do that and just quit."
I have lobbied at times for women's versions of some men's race, but there is an element of "be careful what you wish for" about that, definitely. The women's World Tour does not have the depth of the men's; in the men's calendar it's ok if races clash, squads have 25 riders or so, you can rotate them. That's simply not possible for the women; Cervélo-Bigla managed this season with just 9 riders, only 8 at one point, after Small moved to Cylance in July and before they hired Ciara Horne in late August. They can't send the B-squad to Bira or Gelderland. Instantly elevating women's versions of men's races to the WWT at the expense of threatening the existence of races that have shown they can exist without the coverage - like Bira or Thüringen - is not a great way to go about it, because as is pointed out, if these races are not established they could just as easily fall by the wayside as soon as their level is not that great, or the sponsor with an interest in women's cycling pulls out, or the local star's success dries up. And then we will need the established and traditional races to pick up the pieces, so we don't want to kill them off. Gent-Wevelgem shows the way you SHOULD go about things. They brought in the women's race as a fairly low level race and established it with a decent field to the point where it proved its sustainability and could be elevated. And of course the other point van der Veen makes which is excellent is that, at the majority of these coterminous races, the women's race is basically used as a warm-up. Hell, at Flèche Wallonne, one of the most prestigious of all women's races, ASO (there's those champions of women's cycling once again...) don't even switch the fricking cameras on. At least RCS and Flanders Classics are trying. Only at a couple of events are the women's races the main event, and those are ones like the Ronde van Drenthe where the women's race is an established classic and the men's race a relatively minor 1.1 race.
For a long time I've argued that coterminous events is a way to go to help improve the audience and the esteem in which women's cycling is held. I still think that, but it has to be introduced the right way for it to work, and crowbaring the events in short-term like this is not that way, in my opinion. I still think it's a fair end game, but like with Gent-Wevelgem which I think is a very good example of how this
should work, patience is required to develop it to the point where the women's races are organically developed parts of the event. As things stand, I would expect Flèche remains the most important women's Ardennes race, because it's got history which the others still need to develop, which is why the threat they pose to races that do have that history is an issue. Plouay does things well I think, has the two races on separate days so they are each a main event in their own right to a day's programming.
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