Oh brother, here we go again.
Threads about women's cycling seem to usually end up in the same arguments.
1) I like to watch the best and the men are faster so therefore I don't care about women's cycling.
Fine. But then don't start hyping up U23 racing, or smaller national scenes or whatever, since they aren't the objective best either. Personally, I'd rather watch a really exciting stage in the Tour of some small hilly region of southern Italy than a tightly controlled sprint in the Tour de France, and similarly I'd rather watch an exciting women's race than a boring men's race. Your mileage may vary - see the point about Manchester United above.
2) Women's racing is boring!
So is men's racing. Sorry, but how many tightly controlled sprint stages have we seen recently? Flattish stage races with disappointing parcours, where the ITT settles the GC, or there's only one climbing stage that settles it? The difference between men's and women's cycling in this regard is that our greater knowledge of the men's péloton, as well as the greater degree of hype, more fans and better presentation (especially in terms of TV coverage) means we are more emotionally invested in what happens. You could see a women's race with riders pinging off the front all over the place, but if the poor coverage makes it hard to tell what's going on, and you don't know enough about the sport to really care who wins, then you're not going to react as positively as to a men's race where, frankly, little happens, but then you get one or two important moves.
3) The depth of the field is lacking! The same women are at the top in all the different types of races!
Yes, it is, that's true, but that isn't the fault of the women themselves. There are many reasons for this, but two of them stand above the others, and they are both to do with money. Firstly, due to the lack of money, courses often stay around urban centres paying for them; they can't often afford the middle-of-nowhere hilltop and mountaintop finishes of men's races, and so organisers often create a large number of fairly samey types of parcours. Secondly, the lack of money means that only the women who achieve the best results can command the type of salary and winnings that enable them to concentrate full-time on their cycling. This then manifests itself in them being able to put in more work, and becoming better than the rest of the field, thus ensuring the same cycle continues. The field is unable to truly specialize into climbers, rouleurs, sprinters and so on because there aren't enough races that only favour one group like that for them to justify not trying to be an all-rounder.
4) Marianne Vos sucks compared to men, hurr hurr!
If we can get away from bickering over her time on the Cauberg, I could point out that half the elite men in the 2012 Cyclocross World Championships at Koksijde couldn't ride all the way up the X-Duin. Marianne Vos could. Remember Blijlevens talking about maybe putting her in with men to keep her motivated earlier in the year? We had people going on about how she'd get annihilated at the World Tour? Unless I am very much mistaken, nobody ever mentioned Rabobank World Tour team or expectations of victory other than those making a story out of it or those misinterpreting it. We simply don't know what the expectations were because they weren't really elaborated. It could have been nothing more than riding with Rabo Continental in a few .2 or U23 races to see if she could hack the pace of the group more than anything else.
5) Nobody cares about it, so it isn't shown or covered!
Understandable, but also chicken-and-egg, as Hitch pointed out very well. If you have more exposure to something, you absorb knowledge of it, and you can become more emotionally invested in it. Women's cycling is seldom shown, so how can people discover that they're interested in it? Again, as Hitch pointed out, the sports where women are held in the highest esteem by fans are events where the women's events are at the same time as the men's. Ironically, this gives us more chance to directly compare men's and women's performances than there is in cycling, but we don't directly compare the men's and women's performances that often in those sports. Female skiers, biathletes, track and field athletes and even to an extent track cyclists are allowed to be the best at what they do without having to always be compared to the men. Nobody cares that Shelly-Ann Fraser or Mary Keitany can't run as fast as Usain Bolt or Haile Gebreselassie, nobody cares that Magdalena Neuner or Marit Bjørgen can't ski as fast as Emil Hegle Svendsen or Dario Cologna... we compare them to other women, not to the men.
6) Women's cycling will never be as good as men's cycling, so why bother trying to force it on people?
Because even if it will not be as good as men's cycling, the disparity at present is way larger than it needs to be. There is a potential audience for women's cycling far in excess of the present audience. It may never come close to the audience for men's cycling, but the point is not necessarily equality... it's that women's cycling hasn't even been given the chance to sink or swim in most markets. It needs a bit of an injection of support to create enough variety in the races and enough of a péloton with enough coverage, to give it the chance to sink or swim. It might sink, sure, but it might swim. After all, as previously noted, the Olympics and Worlds may be special cases, but the women's events get big audiences. The Giro Donne has done well enough in Italy in the last few years that highlights have extended from 10 minutes a day in 2009 to 45 minutes a day in 2012. So there could be an audience there - it's just that some people are uncertain about whether they want to take the risk of putting that support behind it in case it fails.
7) Did you see the Copenhagen Worlds? That was abysmal!
Yes it was, and I was horrified to see, on one of the only days when women's cycling could make a statement for itself, they put on the worst race of the year. But did you see the Copenhagen Worlds Men's race? It was hardly much better. The Olympics Road Race should have put the ghosts of Copenhagen to rest. After all, the Beijing Olympics RR, the Mendrisio and Varese Worlds all produced excellent races. More or less the same as the men actually - who would have thought it? The courses where the men's races sucked, the women's did too, and the courses where the men's races were good, so were the women's! Well I never!
8) Hi, I'm Ryo Hazuki and despite the fact that the last few times I weighed in with my comments on women's cycling I wound up getting banned, I thought I'd weigh in again with the same points
Hey, Ryo, how's it going?
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