Jane Belleville said:
There is a five part discussion with considerable amount of content and solutions to the problems with women's cycling. You can give your two cents worth if you want. Other parts are clickable on the side panel.
The Problem with Women’s Cycling kerry-litka.com|small things considered
Jane
It's not a problem that can be simply boiled down to one party's responsibility, as in it's women that are responsible for fixing it or for the problem itself. Like most things involving humans, it's stupid to approach a problem or a fix from just one side.
You make good points in your blog article, but there are others that need mentioned. Sports, through out most of the history of sport, have been male dominated. They're male dominated in terms of money, in terms of fan base, even in coaching methods (i.e., they've likely been based, more often than not, on what's worked for men.). As a result, there's some residual institutional bias against women's cycling. This isn't to say that it's intentional, but rather that cycling hasn't fully adapted to women's competition or involvement in the sport.
Solving the issue is no easy task. Women need a bigger fan base. After all, with more fans comes more people to which sponsors can advertise and more people reading and demanding more press on women's cycling. It's tough though to get fans without press and money. The press need to publish more on women's cycling. Frankly, I think all the magazines and major cycling websites do a **** poor job of giving coverage to women. There are big articles on men's racing and male cyclists, whereas women's racing is quite often lucky to get more than a column. A bigger slice of the limelight, from the magazines, would be a bonus.
Women don't have that grand big race or races. Le TdF Féminin was never a big success, nor a big draw for fans. Press coverage certainly wasn't, uhm, voluminous. Let's face it, the TdF, has introduced a lot of fans to cycling, especially in countries outside of Europe, where cycling isn't so intertwined in daily life and in history. The same can be said about the Classics, the Giro....This goes hand in hand with the fact that women don't have the history replete with legends.
Outside of Jeannie Longo, I can't think of any female racers that have truly been "legends." You know that history is important to a lot of fans of men's cycling. Unfortunately, history only comes with time and can't be grown in the short term. As for the idea that women aren't loyal to a team or are out for themselves, that's a lot like what men's racing was like for a significant part of the 20th Century. Read about the TdF for the first ten, twenty, or summat years: all sorts of back stabbing and riding for one's self was going on. I don't believe it's that a lack of team loyalty has anything to do with anything innate in women. It's only the result of women's racing not having had the time to mature as men's racing did.
The overall improvement to the lot of female cyclists and women's racing isn't something that's going to rapidly improve: there are just too many facets to the problem to fix in just a year or two or maybe ten.
I don't think there's a concrete sequence of steps for improving the lot of women's racing.
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