The State of Women's Cycling 2012

Amber Neben

It's the end of another year in women's cycling. What a year it's been - the racing, as ever, has been first rate, just as you'd expect in a sport full of highly professional, competitive athletes spurred on by their own love for what they do rather than by their love of fat bank balances (and, if any women out there are thinking of taking up cycling as a way of becoming rich, think again. The salaries - if you're fortunate enough to get one, many "professional" female riders don't - remain a joke, as are the prize funds at most races. As an example, the winner of the men's Chrono des Nations received €5,785, the winner of the women's race at the same event received €379. The women's race was shorter at 20.87km, 43% of the 48.5km men's race; but Amber Neben's prize was equal to only 6.55% of that received by Tony Martin).

What's different now compared to where we were at this point last year? Not much, at first glance. The season got under way with the usual bad news that races were being cancelled due to organisers being unable to secure the sponsorship they needed in order to keep them going: the Tour de Languedoc Roussillon and GP Ciudad de Valladolid are two examples of races that are no longer with us (but, with luck, may reappear in future years), the Giro del Trentino Femminile was cut to two days from its usual three and even the famous Holland Ladies' Tour got into trouble with organisers announcing it might have to be cancelled until a new sponsor - the hairdressing chain with a long-standing connection to cycling, Brainwash - came onboard and saved the day. The UCI still says it's fully committed to women's cycling, but still seems unwilling to do very much: women's cycling, it claims, is insufficiently developed at present to justify greater financial input; however, it has apparently decided that rather than putting in the cash required to develop it, it will instead wait for a magical fairy to come along and start the process.

Emma Pooley

Perhaps the two biggest and most depressing stories of the year were Emma Pooley's announcement that she was considering leaving cycling, either temporarily or forever, and Rabobank's decision to pull out of the sport. Pooley, who has for some years now been one of the most prominent voices in the sport, indicated that she'd had enough of her well-thought-out and reasoned campaigns for the women to get a fair deal resulting in nothing of any consequence being done by the UCI and needed time away to concentrate on completing her PhD. Rabobank, which has enjoyed enormous public exposure from the highly successful teams it sponsors (especially the women's team, home to world number one Marianne Vos), announced it would be ending its long connection with cycling because it was no longer confident in the wake of the US Postal/Lance Armstrong investigation that the UCI was able to bring doping to an end. It would, therefore, be ending its sponsorship of both the men's and women's teams, in spite of the fact that doping is virtually non-existent in women's cycling when compared to men's cycling (it said it would, however, continue sponsoring Vos who, as the 21st Century's Eddy Merckx, is every sponsor's dream come true; Vos, being the star that she is, replied that it doesn't work like that and that she and the team come as a package).

Earlier in the year, British Cycling failed to notice that female cyclists competing at the top level of their sport are rock hard, stupendously fit athletes and, in a peculiarly Victorian way, mistook them for weak-willed delicate creatures unable to race on two consecutive days, so it tried to persuade the organisers of the Smithfield Nocturne to drop the women's criterium in order that riders wouldn't be too tired at a (British Cycling) event the following day. The thing is, the Smithfield Nocturne is massively popular event that draws thousands of fans (and generates new ones) in addition to - crucially - getting TV coverage, whereas the British Cycling race isn't. It is, therefore, simply too important to be allowed not to go ahead. Team Mule Bar Girls were first on the case and got a promise from the organisers that, provided a sufficient number of riders signed up, they'd go ahead and run the race anyway. Then, realising that they too could help, fans joined in by Tweeting, Facebooking, blogging and doing all manner of things that have required new words to be added to the English language over the last few years. The race was saved, and it didn't take very long to save it.

The Olympic Women's Road Race was watched by millions

This may yet prove to be the biggest thing that has happened in women's cycling in 2012: the rapid emergence of a new "activism meme" among fans, fueled at least in part by the unexpected success of the Women's Road Race at the Olympics which generated viewing figures far higher than anyone had hoped. We have realised that we do not have to be - and should not be - the silent partner in the riders/organisers and federations/audience triumvirate and that, as the majority of riders, directeur sportifs and race organisers are already doing all that they can, it's down to us to use collective effort to pressure federations, raise funds and get more people to races - by doing so we can help make the changes that the UCI won't, even though the millions of people that watched the Women's Road Race at the Olympics proves a potential audience exists.

Indicative that this is the case is the success of two new projects - namely the Women's Cycling Social Media Jersey and the Fan-Backed Women's Team. When the Media Jersey project began, organisers Sarah and Dan hoped to raise a few hundred dollars to award a t-shirt and a small cash sum as a prize to the rider decided by a poll (which ultimately received 4,605 votes, a fantastic response) to have done most to raise the sport's profile - within only days, it became apparent that they were going to raise enough to much more: the overall winner would receive a t-shirt and $500 and the riders decided to have done most at the Giro Toscana and the Tour de l’Ardèche and Brainwash Ladies Tour would receive $250, while the two runners-up would receive $100. Perhaps the first person to spot the emergence of this trend was Stef Wyman. Wyman is a man with a dream - he wants to see women's cycling become everything it can and should be and he wants professional female cyclists to be on equal footing, both in terms of recognition and salaries, with professional male cyclists - but he is not a dreamer: in fact, as the manager of Matrix-Prendas, the team he has built up through hard times into one of the most successful in cycling, he's about as much a realist as anyone could be. Back in September, Wyman wrote an article for Cyclismas in which he posited the idea that a fan-backed team, in which development would be driven by fans' passion for the sport rather than by sponsors' wallets, might be one way in which women's cycling could be taken forward. It was an idea that proved to have legs as strong as those on the riders in his team and he immediately began getting emails from people who were willing to get involved and provide funds; already the Fan-Backed Women's Team has grown to become more than just one team and is becoming involved with race promotion.

The general feeling is that we don't need to rely on the reluctant UCI - they're not going to help and we don't need them to do so; in the very near future, as a direct result, we might look back on 2012 as the year when women's cycling turned the corner and entered the final sprint into its glorious future. Despite the many problems still facing the sport, I'm more optimistic about the future of women's cycling than I have been at any time since I began following it, and I'm not the only one.

For an athlete's view on fan involvement, read Amber Pierce's article on the subject at Triple Crankset.

Chrono des Nations

Parcours - the women's route is in pink (click to enlarge)

21.10.12 Official site
France, Time Trial, 20.870km
UCI 1.1

It seems incredible that the Tour of Qatar was eight months ago - yet the Chrono des Nations was the final UCI professional women's race of the 2012 road racing season. (Worry not - we now have several months of fantastic cyclo cross to keep us going through the winter months!)

Team USA's Amber Neben won last year (for the two years prior to that it was Jeannie Longo, who also won the first women's edition of the race back in 1987 as well as in 1992, 1995 and 2000 - she was eighth this year) and was easy favourite to win again this year: she did not disappoint her legions of fans with a stunning ride in slippery conditions, taking 28'34.38" to get around the 20.87km parcours and beating closest rival Alison Tetrick of Exergy Twenty12 by 1'08". Tetrick will be happy enough, however - her second place marks a return to form following injury earlier in the year. Edwige Pitel, riding for ASPSA Grenoble, may be 45 years old but put the finishing touch to a superb season in which she won a bronze medal at the French Individual Time Trial Championships and took first place at the Memorial Davide Fardelli when she crossed the line with a time 18" behind Tetrick, placing her in third place.

Amber Neben

Current Swiss ITT Champion Patricia Schwager, riding for a national team rather than her usual GSD-Gestion, was fourth with 30'03.71". Marijn de Vries was Déesses' top "rider to watch" tip - the Dutch woman has had excellent form over the last few months and a turn of speed to match. With the sad news that her AA Drink-Leontien.nl will not continue into 2013, there was every reason to expect her to end the season on a high point and she did so with a superb fifth place, getting around the course in 30'`15.83".

An interesting fact for you: the Elite Men's race was 48.5km, the women's race was 20.870km. Some might say this justifies the men getting bigger prizes - after all, they did more work. Yet Neben won only €379, compared to the €5,785 that Tony Martin won in the Elite Men's race. In other words, the women did 43% of the work done by the men, yet the winner received a prize equal to only 6.55% of that received by the winning man. The total prize fund on offer to the women was €2,478, 16.55% of the €14,977 fund for the men. No matter which way you look at it, there's no justifying that.

The Parcours
The race began at the Place de la Gare on the Rue du Onze Novembre 1918 and sent the riders immediately into a long and mostly straight (except for the slight bend to the left near the end) 0.68km to the first corner; since this section sloped gently downhill spectators were treated to some spectacularly fast starts. The first corner was a tight right-hander into the Rue Nationale (D755) at a bar called La Tonnelle - while the corner was wide, the Nationale is one of the main truck routes in and out of Les Herbiers and with several small industrial units nearby there was a potential risk of fuel spillages on the road surface and most riders grabbed a big handful of brake going into it. Right from the first corner the parcours began to climb, then descended again after 2.25km; then climbed once more to the second right-hand corner 6.63km from the first at La Croix Barat, the highest point on the route reaching 170m above sea level after approximately 65m of climbing in 2km - an average gradient of around 3.25%, but more like 7% in places. This corner, more sweeping than the last, has had a traffic island slightly off-set from the centre added to prevent cars taking it at too high a speed, thus making it a relatively technical section.

Marijn de Vries

Once around the corner, the riders were on the D79 leading south for 2.6km to the third right corner. The road, like the previous two, is fairly straight with only wide, sweeping bends, but trees alongside are dropping their leaves at this time of year - another potential hazard when wet and slippery. The terrain descends for most of the distance, gently at first and then more steeply in the final third of the section before a short rise at the end. The corner is sharp, but with plenty of room for a bike allowing riders to negotiate it at speed. The following section, La Bonneliere, carries the riders through 4.29km into St-Paul-en-Pareds, a flat route with only a couple of 10m climbs before a descent over the final kilometre; other than more dropped leaves it looks to be free of conceivable hazards.

After following the Rue de l'Eglise and the D23 - more straight, non-technical roads - through St-Paul-en-Pareds, the race reaches a fourth right turn and begins heading north back towards Les Herbiers. The corner is very wide, not sharp and shouldn't cause any rider any problems; it leads into an initially bendy, then straight 2.82km section through forest to a roundabout on the D23, climbing approximately 30m over the first half. Immediately after the roundabout the riders come to Ardelay, a suburb of Les Herbiers, then reach a second roundabout after 1.58km. The flamme rouge is 400m ahead, then riders negotiate a third roundabout before coming to the final turn 610m after the flamme rouge. Another right-hander, this one turns almost 180 degrees around a mini-roundabout and is likely to be very slippery if wet; riders positing good times will be likely to take great care not to throw away their chances at this point when there are only 400m along the straight, slightly uphill Avenue de la Gare to the finish line at the Place de la Gare.

Results

1 Amber NEBEN Team USA 28'34"
2 Alison TETRICK STARNES Exergy Team Twenty 12 +1'08 "
3 Edwige PITEL ASPSA Grenoble +1'26"
4 Patricia SCHWAGER Team Switzerland +1'29"
5 Marijn DE VRIES AA Drink-Leontien.nl +1'41"
6 Cecilie Gotaas JOHNSEN Hitec Products +1'57"
7 Mélodie LESUEUR BigMat-Auber 93 +2'03"
8 Jeannie LONGO-CIPRELLI ASPSA Grenoble +2'15"
9 Ann-Sofie DUYCK Lotto-Belisol +2'16"
10 Lina-Kristin SCHINK GSD-Gestion +2'32"
11 Jutta STIENEN Team Switzerland +2'36"
12 Larissa DRYSDALE CS Groningue +2'58"
13 Martina RUZICKOVA SC Michela Fanini-Rox +3'05"
14 Mélanie BRAVARD Vélophile Naintré +3'23"
15 Aurore VERHOEVEN UV Angérienne +3:45
16 Coralie DEMAY Comité du Morbihan +4'03"
17 Johanna SMITH TF Languedoc-Roussillon +4'27"
18 Sandra LEVENEZ UC Carhaix +4'30"
19 Morgane CHARLES CSM Epinay-sur-Seine +5'00"
20 Julie AUGIZEAU La Roche-sur-Yon VC +5'03"
21 Danièle PAROT TF Région Centre +5'33"
22 Muriel RIDEAU La Roche-sur-Yon VC +5'47"
23 Marie TONDEREAU TF Région Centre +6'15"
24 Carole VALLEE VC Lionnais +6'30"
25 Marion SICOT TF Région Centre +6'44"

An open letter to Rabobank

Lense Koopmans is the supervisory director of Rabobank's Supervisory Board, a body that "supervises the policy of the Executive Board of Rabobank Nederland and the general conduct affairs at Rabobank Group and its affiliated entities. In addition, the Supervisory Board advises the Executive Board and is responsible for the appointment and remuneration of the members of the Executive Board." 

I have emailed a copy to Rabobank - if you agree that the Rabobank women's team should not suffer from the possible withdrawal of Rabobank's sponsorship due to doping in men's cycling, please feel free to copy the letter and send it under your own name. One email won't make much of a difference, but if enough women's cycling fans ask Rabobank to make the right decision we might be able to help ensure their future support.


Dear Mr. Koopmans,

First off, please allow me to apologise for contacting you in this manner - I have no doubt that, as the supervisory director of Rabobank, you are a very busy man. However, I am writing to you in order to share some thoughts on a matter involving your company and which is of very great importance to myself and to an ever-increasing number of people around the world, and reading this letter will take only a few moments of your time. I hope you will spare me those few moments.

You've probably already guessed that I'm talking about Rabobank's recent decision to withdraw from professional cycling sponsorship. I fully understand the reasons for this decision: like all cycling fans, I had hoped that doping was finally coming to an end in the sport and I am deeply upset at the recent USADA revelations that show it has remained a far greater problem than we thought. If I was the director of a company such as yours, I too would feel reluctant to continue associating my company with cycling now that doping is in the spotlight once again. I'd like to add at this point that the decision to honour contracts, now that it would be too late for the riders to find new teams, is admirable proof that Rabobank has a heart, rather than being simply another inhuman, uncaring giant corporation. Proficiat for that!

One of the reasons I admire Rabobank (the company and the cycling team) is your fantastic support of women's cycling. While I'm sure that part of the company's decision to become involved in women's cycling is that there were and still are very few "big name" sponsors, allowing Rabobank to gain greater public awareness from it than would be possible in men's cycling which benefits from numerous very famous sponsors, I've always believed there was something more to it, something related to the altruistic ideals upon which Rabobank was first established: a desire to help female cyclists get the recognition and equality that they deserve. The salaries you pay to those riders and the money you've put into promoting them is a shining example of fairness in a sport where many receive no salary at all and compete for prizes that are a tiny fraction of those on offer to the men. I like to think also that Rabobank was the first company to realise that the women's sport is not a less exciting version of cycle racing and that the riders are not weaker and less interesting than their male counterparts; that in actual fact women's racing is always every bit as interesting and competitive as men's and, sometimes, more so.

Women's cycling has never suffered from the same image problems caused by doping that men's cycling has experienced; yet the riders are subject to the same tests with the same regularity. The only conclusion, therefore, is that doping is far less prevalent in women's cycling. Imagine how women's cycling would benefit if Rabobank were to decide that the support it had given in the past would continue and that the reason was because so few female riders resort to cheating. Men's cycling will take a knock from the current scandal, then continue just as it did after Tom Simpson died and in the wake of the Festina Affair and Operacion Puerto - it might even benefit from the scar left by the withdrawal of Rabobank, which would serve as a reminder that when riders dope everybody loses. But if Rabobank stayed with women's cycling, the benefits would be enormous - it would be seen by the media to be the far cleaner, fairer form of cycling that evidence suggests it really is. With women's cycling currently more popular than ever before in the wake of the Olympics and Marianne Vos' superb victory at the World Championships, the news that Rabobank had decided to remain a part of it could do more good than all the money you've provided and then some.

I also understand that a final decision has not yet been made on the future of the Rabobank women's team (and I'm pleased to hear that you will continue sponsoring Vos, who is a hero to so many of us). I hope, therefore, that the points above will be considered - Rabobank has an opportunity to do women's cycling an enormous favour, and the increased exposure for the sport and the riders would surely make financial sense.

Many thanks for your time.

2012 World Champion

Weekly Women's Cycling News You Might Have Missed 15.09.12

Bronzini ain't afraid of the big bad Fox - Polspoel leaves Topsport - Help Kristin Armstrong get her bikes back - Fan-backed teams: the future of women's cycling? - Unofficial, Unsanctioned Social Media Jersey  gaining strength - Ardeche rider reports and photos - This week's best pictures - Articles worth a read

Bronzini aiming for a third rainbow

"It's a tough route, far more selective than in the last two years," admits defending World Champion Giorgia Bronzini, "but I've trained hard for it and I want the rainbow jersey."

The Italian ace sprinter, who turned 29 in August, is expecting stiff competition however and knows that she might even end up surrendering her chances to someone from her own team: "If it's a really hard race and the peloton is split apart, it might be down to Elisa Longo-Borghini or Noemi Cantele to try to get away to the finish line - but I'll try to stay as close as possible, and we'll just have to see if it ends with a sprint."

Marianne Vos won the Worlds in 2006 and tried unsuccessfully to repeat her success ever since; but it's a well known fact that, sooner or later, Marianne Vos wins everything - having come so close last year, the Dutch phenomenon is the favourite for 2012. Bronzini knows this, but refuses to be intimidated: "She was also the favourite the last two years. Which I won," she says.

Polspoel to Sengers
All-rounder Maaike Polspoel will depart Topsport Vlaanderen-Ridley at the end of the season and will move to Sengers. The decision may be linked to being overlooked for the Belgian team going to the World Championships, rather a mysterious decision by the selection committee as the 23-year-old has had some excellent results this year the hilly Limburg parcours seems suited to her.

Kristin Armstrong's Felt bikes stolen
If you should happen to be offered a very nice Felt bike at a price that seems too good to be true, you might want to get in contact with Exergy Twenty12 - there's a reasonable chance that they belong to Kristin Armstrong. The bikes were stolen whilst in transit somewhere between Germany and the USA and could therefore turn up in Europe or North America and the team is offering a reward for information that leads to their recovery. More details here.

The future of women's cycling...?
Stef Wyman, manager of highly successful British women's team Matrix Fitness-Prendas, wrote an article for Cyclismas on how fans can help the sport to develop recently. You can read it here.

Stef Wyman - knows what he's
talking about

Anyone who knows anything about women's cycling knows that Stef knows what he's talking about - he's nurtured the team from day one and enabled it to grow bigger and better every year, despite no doubt going through some tough times when he must have been tempted to give it all up.  But Stef doesn't run his team as a side-project or simply in the hope of putting together an impressive cv for future job applications to big budget men's teams; he does it out of a genuine love for women's cycling. He is, therefore, dreaming of the next step - and he dreams big. What he wants to do, no less, is develop his team into "UK’s primary racing academy for women," no less, thus driving and promoting the sport here and abroad and helping the athletes to get the fair deal that they so fully deserve.

In his article, he suggested that one way to do this might be to have a fan-backed team, ie one in which salaries and team development is funded by commercial sponsors while donations made by fan are put towards promoting the team and other uses agreed between team management and a committee of the fans themselves. The very same night the article was published, the article grew a pair of legs that any pro rider would be proud of - within a day, it started happening.

This could be the future of women's cycling, the way in which the exposure and coverage that the sport needs and isn't getting from elsewhere will be paid for and provided. The women's road race at the Olympics showed that there is a market for women's cycling - with £14,000 raised in only four days, this project might be the turning point from which women's cycling grows into what it has the potential to be. Read more about it at the Matrix-Prendas website.

Unofficial, Unsanctioned Social Media Jersey goes from strength to strength
In the week's second fan power story, the prize fund for the all new UUSMJ - which consists entirely of donations made by fans - now stands at more than $2000; enough to be split into a number of prizes. Since it's considerably more than the total prize fund on offer at many women's races, it now has the potential to make a very real difference to the riders that win it.

Got an idea who you think deserves it? Votes can now be cast at the Unofficial, Unsanctioned Women's UCI Cycling Blog.

Riders' reports and photos from the Tour Cycliste Féminin International de l'Ardèche
Marijn de Vries 1 / 2 / 3
Leah Kirchmann
Sara Olsson

The week in pictures
Sengers riders training for the Worlds (@Bartoli84)

Worth a read
The Role of Fans in Women's Cycling (Stef Wyman)
Immersion in the heart of women's cycling (Christophe Edelaine, manager of the Ardeche mixed international team)
Ridley Asteria 1106a review (Triradar)

Help Kristin get her bikes back

If you should happen to be offered a very nice Felt bike at a price that seems too good to be true, you might want to get in contact with Exergy Twenty12 - there's a reasonable chance that they belong to Kristin Armstrong. The bikes were stolen whilst in transit somewhere between Germany and the USA and could therefore turn up in Europe or North America. More details here.

The bikes are as follows:

Felt DA Time Trial Bike / Pic2 / Pic3
Frameset: Felt DA1 51cm, Custom Kristin Armstrong/USA Paint Scheme
Group: SRAM RED 2012
Cranks: SRAM BB30 w/SRM Powermeter
Chainrings: SRAM TT 54/42
Aerobars: Zipp VukaBull Basebar with Carbon Race Vuka Shift Extensions TT Shifters: SRAM 900 TT
Shift Cables: Gore Ride-On Ultra Light
Brake Cables: Gore Ride-on
Front Wheel: Zipp 808 Firecrest Tubular
Rear Wheel: Zipp Super-9 Disc Tubular
Tyres: Vittoria Crono 22mm
Saddle: fi’zi:k Ares TT Specific
Pedals/Cleats: Speedplay Nanogram Zero (not with stolen bike – only thing that made it back to Boise)
K-EDGE Pro Chain Catcher
Kristin Armstrong name on top tube

Felt F1 Road Bike
Frameset: Felt F1 54cm, Custom Kristin Armstrong Paint Scheme
Group: SRAM RED 2012
Cranks: SRAM RED w/SRM Powermeter
Bottom Bracket: SRAM Red GXP Ceramic Bearings
Chainrings: SRAM Red 50/34
Cassette: SRAM RED 2012 11-26T
Stem: Zipp Service Course SL 110mm
Bars: Zipp Service Course CSL 42cm
Shift Cables: Gore Ride-On
Wheels: Zipp 404 Firecrest Tubular
Tyres: Vittoria Corsa CX
Saddle: fi’zi:k Antares
Pedals/Cleats: Speedplay Nanogram Zero
K-EDGE Pro Chain Catcher
K-EDGE Number Holder
Arundel Carbon Bottle Cage

Chances are a few bits and pieces will be removed or swapped for other bits in an attempt to disguise them, but with such a collection of top-notch parts the thief won't want to change too much for fear of reducing the value. The team is offering "a substantial reward" for productive leads; you'll also earn the gratitude of one of the greatest cyclists the world has ever seen.

teamtwenty12@gmail.com

Who will win the World Road Race Championship?

I'm not going to bother writing any coverage of the Worlds, because it's one of the few women's races with a high enough profile to get the sort of media attention that all the other big races ought to get too - but I wouldn't want to miss an opportunity to wish good luck to the best rider, male of female, I've seen in the three decades I've followed professional cycling.

Succes gewenst, Marianne!