A TREATISE ON DEVELOPING INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S RACING: PART 2

Having talked about re-structuring women’s pro teams yesterday, I’m going to take a sharp right hander today and talk about the single thing that drives me the most bonkers when people discuss promoting women’s cycling. And by “promote” they mean try and tart it up.

This is the same sort of logic that has led the head of FIFA to call for skimpier outfits in Women’s soccer, rather than say, refs that can call handballs correctly.

 

2) Don’t Bring Sexy Back.  Leave Sexy Alone

Philippe Gilbert is not sexy; he does not need to be. No one expects him to be.  They just expect him to smash fields under his heel in major one day races. (Disclaimer: If you have a pirate fetish Gilbert might turn your crank)

  Similarly no one says “Hey Mark Renshaw - you know how you can get over the whole ‘can’t sprint for yourself’ career hurdle? Turn up the dial on your sex appeal!”

I stand corrected. In that helmet, the dial is already at 11.

Yet when people talk about promoting women’s cycling there is always a demographic that jumps up and down with their hands in the air talking about capitalizing on women athlete’s feminine wiles.  They may mean well, but what they are proposing is a recipe to undermine the sport. So to those people I say:

Please put your hands down and sit in your chair.

When you try and market sex appeal first and foremost you any gains in exposure and sponsorship dollars come at the loss of long term credibility.   

And when you try to market a women’s team or the sport as a whole – you are going to face the exact same trade off.  Rock Racing tried- and not surprisingly their women’s team was taken even less serious than their men’s team (which they built with the more conventional formula of heaps of cash and dodgy foreign riders).  Not only is the broader industry and general public not really engaged with women’s cycling, no matter how hard you try and hot it up, but the best women rider’s have no interest in riding for a team where that is the marketing hook.

You need some sprinting skills to back up hair like that.

This isn’t to say that riders can’t be more marketable because of their looks- this is a reality of celebrity, and one riders like Boonen and Cippollini have traded rather heavily on in their careers.  Emma Johannson is a rider that balances being both blazing fast and a stone cold fox.  But she is first and foremost one of the best riders in the world.  That she is attractive is just an addendum, her ability stands on its own (Note: At this point my wedding ring began to glow a faint red colour and burn with an angry heat).

You don’t get the World Cup Leader’s jersey for being a hottie. Or even the novelty flower bouquet.

At the end of the day a rider like Ina Teutenberg might be just as marketable because she represents the opposite. One can admire her for the exact reasons one admires her male counterparts, she is simply an excellent bike racer.  She can win field-sprints, ride breakaways, and is the consummate team player. She is a brick solid-trucker cap wearing-mullet sporting-beer swilling-ass kicker. 

And that is way more awesome than a picture in Maxim.

note: In yesterday's post I failed to mention the Infinit Women's Team which is another great Ottawa region women's team working hard to promote the sport. Apologies for the oversight!

A Treatise on Developing International Women’s Racing

There has been considerable discussion recently on how to best develop and promote women’s cycling at the international level.  Because I have absolutely no lever to affect actual change, I’ve decided to write a series of blog posts about it.

Obviously the first step is to have healthy grass roots and junior programs at the local level to feed into the national scene.  In my own backyard there are groups trying to do just this: the Ottawa Bicycle Club is one example of a great junior program trying to engage young girls.  And the Stevens p/b the Cyclery Team I’m involved with is a fantastic women’s team trying to bridge the gap from the junior and provincial ranks to the North American level.

However that’s not where I’m going to focus my attention on.  I’m going to look at the top elite racing scene.  Because oddly enough, I’m kind of an expert on women’s racing, albeit a self declared one.

I don’t declare it lightly.  I have followed it on a daily basis at a provincial, national and international level with a possibly obsessively compulsive level of interest for over a decade. I have DS’d teams at World Cup and UCI events, and have watched literally hundreds of women’s races from the local to NRC level.

Now I want to put forth the disclaimer that my experiences are someone mitigated by the obvious fact that I’m a dude (astute readers will have already noticed this).

I don’t claim to understand all of the adversities and double standards that women racers live with.  But I do claim to have witnessed most of them.

So if you can forgive a guy going on about what he thinks needs to be done to promote girls racing bikes we’ll begin.

1) The Structure of Women’s Pro Teams

One argument that is often put forth is that the women’s infrastructure should simply be grafted onto the men’s – both in terms of team and racing.  This idea certainly has some real benefits, but it also brings with it shortcomings. Let’s discuss the team aspect first and revisit the racing component at a later date.

Just look how well these Canuck teamates were getting along in 2003!

Actually this picture is kinda creepy. Manon wins in not having to give a dude a piggy back.

Joint Teams

There are big pluses to running a pro women’s team in conjunction with an established World Tour or Pro Continental Men’s program.  One of these is cost savings, the women’s team benefits from access to vehicles, team bases and facilities and behind the scenes staff that can all be shared amongst the team.  Additionally the women’s team benefits from being exposed to a more established professional environment in terms of expectations and behaviour- this was commented heavily by riders in interviews during the HTC team’s lifespan.

Also it is relatively cheap to do so in terms of a big team’s budget.  For example the entire women’s Garmin program ran on less than the cost of the men’s team anti-doping program.  In recent days Willier has been tossed aside as the bike sponsor of the Lampre team because their current commitment of €1.5 million and 130 bikes annually was out bid by Merida.  For frame of reference a few years ago Canada’s only female UCI team operated on roughly a fifth of that amount of money and a tiny fraction of the material support.

HOWEVER- the catch is that history has shown over and over again, that if the men’s team encounters any kind of financial difficulty, that the women’s team is gutted to keep the men’s program afloat.  It happened with Garmin, it happened with the Autotrader.com women’s team which allegedly saw almost their entire budget injected into Mercury.

 Hey ladies, Jonathon called- yeah you need to give that money back.

The bottom line is that in the current environment a women’s program run in conjunction with a men’s team will not be the priority and is likely to suffer because of it.  That said I don’t know anything about the nuts and bolts of how the current Green Edge set up is run- maybe it is a sign that they are moving past this barrier and onto more equitable footing.

A Proposal for 3 Categories of UCI Women’s Team

Part of the biggest challenge facing women racers looking to take steps towards being full time professionalism is the massive uncertainty surrounding the current team structures.  At the moment there is one classification of Women’s UCI team- and this runs the spectrum from well run and funded operations like Green Edge and Specialized-Lululemon to what are essentially club teams that are just struggling to get riders on the start line for a full racing calendar.

This is muddied even further because some well run set ups (especially in North America) don’t register with the UCI.  Optum is an example of a team that is thriving without any UCI registration. (As a side benefit it means that riders on non UCI teams are free to race for their national federations at major UCI events).

There has been calls from some top riders that the UCI needs to mandate a minimum wage for women.  And one one hand this makes sense, and the best women in the world undoubtedly deserve that level of support and security.

But the truth is that this measure would bankrupt many (if not most) of the current UCI team set ups.  And while these teams may just be scrapping by and many are not paying their riders- they are still playing an important role in developing women’s cycling.  The UCI simply can’t adopt a measure that would force even more women out of the top level of the sport.

What is needed it a two tier set up- the lower level would essentially be the status quo.  All of the same standards and fees as imposed today.  Essentially it would function like the men’s Continental class of UCI team.

The higher tier would be akin to a World Tour level, and with it would come the minimum wage, as well as calendar incentives, and other organisational guarantees.  This second tier would give reassurance to the top women when they signed contracts that they would be paid a living wage and could expect a certain increased level of professionalism from the team.

Now you notice I have proposed 3 categories and only two tiers? The third category would be teams affiliated with major men’s teams (Pro-Continental or World Tour) and would functionally be the same as the higher tier I proposed earlier.  The difference would be solely to the organisation of the team. 

There must be some mechanism that would allow the UCI to show preference or give registration breaks to World Tour teams that had twinned men and women’s programs to create an incentive for having a women’s team.

The best one I have come up with is a ranking incentive.

The women’s team should count as a fixed number of UCI points towards the Mens team’s World Tour status.  This might make a lot of financial sense for some teams- as the cost of a big name rider is often more than the entire budgets of top female teams. 

Heck - it beats hiring and then firing an Iranian; which was Lotto’s strategy to get into the World Tour last year.



Tugboat Can't Save You Now.

In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.
             -Hunter S. Thompson

Five Reasons the World of Lance is the Same as Before

The last few weeks have seen the cycling world “reeling” or “turned on it’s head” by the whole USADA Armstrong three-ring circus.  People are proclaiming that everything has changed, they are either shocked or justified in their previous convictions that he doped. In some cased they still believe in Lance and now saw USADA is out of line.  Passions have flared and the debate has raged online, on rides and over beers.  It seems that many cycling fans have been left stumbling around as if they had just stumbled through the looking glass.

Personally, I think nothing has changed.

Let me outline some of the points of my argument:

1)      Did you really think he was a nice guy beforehand?

Other than that little detail of being a Champion to Millions in the Fight against Cancer, what has he done that made you think he was a nice guy?  He sued a team sponsor when he won his first tour after they ran an add congratulating him (apparently they had the rights to sponsor the team, not use Lance’s image) and he has systematically destroyed the careers of people that stood against him (I give you Simeoni).  The guy has pretty much had to be the alpha in every situation at all costs- and its clearly cost him friends and relationships over the years.  And you get the impression he probably doesn’t care.

Dude is kinda a dick.

2)      Did you honestly think he was clean?

In bike racing, where there is smoke there is all too often fire.  Several of his lieutenants went on to test positive after leaving Postal, and more to the point he was part of a generation, that in the clarity of hindsight, appears to have been doped to the gills.

3)      He’s still the best rider of his generation.

I don’t want to be labelled an Armstrong apologist but drugs can’t make a racehorse out of a donkey.  Everything about Mr. Armstrong’s long and illustrious career (and his stint in triathlon prior to that) suggests that he was genetically one in a million.  He won the pro world title at an age when he was still a U23 and  had a fairly successful time as a classics rider (he won Fleche Wallone if anyone remembers) all BEFORE becoming the Tour de France obsessed winning machine.  And he did it against a generation of pros that were at least as dirty as he allegedly was.

Move over if you look at this seven tour wins he also had luck on his side- you can’t dope your way to seven tours without crashing out, flatting at the wrong moment, or having a mishap in the first week.  That he did it seven years in a row is astounding.

4)      He still helped the sport explode onto the mainstream.

Lance was in Dodgeball. Nobody is going to put Cadel Evans in a Ben Stiller flick anytime soon.  Hell he couldn’t even make an episode of Two and a Half Men if he was the half man.

For a time there, if you raced bikes at least the general public would ask you “Like Lance?” rather than “would you ever try and do an Ironman? That sport is really tough!”

5)      The sport is still cleaner than it was before.

I’m not actually sure I can prove this. But I, and others, believe it- and maybe that on its own is a good start.  Teams like Garmin and Sky have based their business models on being clean teams- and that for sure is a step in the right direction.  If the cycling world decides earnestly to clean itself up at a high level them maybe it can be done- otherwise there will always be more young guns looking to be pros, sadly they are a replacible commodity.  Title sponsors on the other hand are harder to find- when the teams themselves say enough is enough then maybe things are finally changing.

Did We Fail?

A Retrospective Look at Canadian Cycling at the London Olympics

Great expectations.

Canada’s top cyclists undoubtedly entered London poised for greatness.  They entered these games with World Champions and World Cup winners amongst their roster.  They were bold enough to predict not just three medals but that that was a conservative estimate.

Comparisons were made to the 1996 Games where Canadian cyclists won medals in all three cycling disciplines (BMX having not yet been added).  Tara Whitten had won three World Titles in the period since Beijing, and Catherine Pendrel has become the standard against which female mountain bike racers are measured.  Zach Bell was a contender, and who could forget, that Canada had something new – a Grand Tour Winner! While Ryder was outnumbered in the road race, surely he could be counted on to repeat his high pressure time trial performance of the Giro.  Clara Hughes, a Canadian sporting legend, had returned to the sport to fulfil her manifest destiny of becoming Canada’s most decorated Olympian.

And yet we fell short.

First Ryder crashed out of the Tour de France putting a cloud over his conditioning.

Then Hughes could not match the torrid pace of Kristin Armstrong- herself on a comeback from both having her first child and breaking her collarbone at the Exergy Tour.

Whitten fought a 6-round out and out war with the top athletes from Great Britton, Australia and the United States.  And lost.  So narrowly, heartbreakingly, lost.

And perhaps most inexplicably, Pendrel, Canada’s most consistent performer, an athlete with a history of rising to the occasion at the biggest events- just had an off day.  It’s something ordinary in bike racing, something that happens at some point to everyone that has ever raced a bike.  At any race on any given day there is always one favourite that falls short.  Catherine lined up, and it just wasn’t her day.  Pendrel, who rose to the occasion four years ago in Beijing to finish 4^th, and who has gone from strength to strength ever since, faded badly on the open exposed course in Hadleigh Field to come 9^th.  At just about any other race, in any other year, Pendrel and her coach Dan Proulx could just call it an outlier and move on- but unfortunately it happened on a day that only comes every four years.

Jacques Landry, the head of Cycling Canada, gave some sage words afterwards when he told the media to remember that both Pendrel and Whitten are World Champions.  And remain champions.  Fans of Canadian cycling can take pride in the way our athletes fought through adversity.  Perhaps there was no better example of this than Zach Bell, who when clearly not in the form that he had hoped to be, and with his medal ambitions slipping through his fingers, chose to go on the attack rather than concede defeat.  His win in the scratch race did little to help his overall placing- but it spoke volumes to his character.

Monique Sullivan, in her own quite and unassuming way, did what Olympians should do.  She fought uphill for two years to even qualify a spot at these games, and when she got the opportunity to come and compete put together some of the best races she has ever had.  She combined the grit, tactics, speed and aggression needed to make the keirin final- and in doing so earned the right to line up as one of the fastest 6 women in the world on two wheels.  There was no medal for her at the end of the day- but in making the final she rose to the challenge and embodied the Olympic ideal.

From Atlanta to London

There is no doubt that Canadian cyclists performed better in Atlanta than London.  The medals alone tell that story.

But there is another story, one where in London we have changed the markers for how we wish to be measured.  While every medal in Atlanta seemed to come with a story of an upset ride from an underdog (with perhaps the exception of Curt Harnett in the men’s sprint) Canada came to London hungry for more.  Results that had previously been seen as successes were seen as failures.  On the track Canada fielded riders in six events and were competitive in five.

We had riders that could win, and they were justifiably upset when they did not.

They were well supported, by systematic work that was done behind the scenes in the year leading up to the games to help ensure our riders had the best possible environments to perform.  Geoff Kabush, in riding to 8^th place and Canada’s best ever men’s cross country results thanked Dan Proulx and the rest of the staff that made it possible.  Kabush has a pretty good frame of reference when it comes to Olympic performances. He set the previous benchmark twelve years ago in Sydney when he was 9th.

No where is this transformation seen more clearly than in the even where we did medal- in the inaugural Women’s Team Pursuit.  Four years ago when it was announced that this event would be included in the Olympics, key individuals chose to focus on it as an avenue for a medal.  A plan was laid out.  And it was followed up with training camps, a base in Los Angeles, added staff including physiotherapists and nutritionists, trips to the wind tunnel and efforts to procure the best equipment available.  And it paid dividends with a shinning set of bronze medals for three talented athletes. 

And in this lies the road to Rio- Canadian Cycling needs start planning now (other Nation’s already have), follow through and perhaps most importantly procure funding for it all.

And hopefully, somewhere in Canada, young kids have seen the efforts of Catherine, Monique, Zach, Tara and Geoff and through to themselves that just maybe one day they themselves can win.

Doping at Fondo's?

Why are people cheating to recreate?

Should they be testing at the Heart and Stroke ride too?

I don't know what's worse. Cheating to win a fondo, or that it's so obvious people will cheat that they had to have doping control.

En forme or no form?

They feel pretty much the same.
You just do better with one.
The results may change but the suffering stays the same.