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It's also important to highlight that the Tour de France is one of the most sexist sporting events still around. Cycling in general. The cycling establishment

It's also important to highlight that the Tour de France is one of the most sexist sporting events still around. Cycling in general. The cycling establishment refuses to allow equality for women. The women's Tour didn't even exist before 2022. The current women's tour is a pale shadow of the men's. The women are not allowed to ride the same tour, they can only do 8 stages and almost none of the 8 correspond to the men's race (they're 50-100km shorter). The 2023 women's edition got one time trial and one mountain stage. It's pathetic. The entire UCI behaves like it's the year 1800. There's a written rule that women are not allowed to race the same distances and times as men. It doesn't matter that they can. It doesn't matter that they want to. It doesn't matter if they raise the money to. The rule is, women must be inferior to men in cycling. It's just like with marathon running, you literally have older men in power holding women back for no reason at all. Women just want to cycle. They aren't demanding the same rewards or the same prize money. They just want to ride the same race! Why wouldn't we allow that? There's pretty good evidence that women are actually better endurance athletes than men. I wonder if one day we'll see the Women's Tour actually beat out the men's. PS: Someone in a reply said that clearly women can't do this. We know women can. And they can even beat men at it! Take the RAAM (Race Across America, a gruelling almost 3000 mile race, nearly 5000km). Women are allowed to join in. This is even longer than the Tour. Not only have many women finished RAAM, in Leah Goldstein actually won. Not the women's category. The race outright. Period. Or the Transcontinental Race (TRC, similar to RAAM but across Europe and without a support team, between 3000-4000km depending on the year). Not only have many women participated and completed it, in 2019 a Fiona Kolbinger won. And again, not the women's category. She won the 10 day race beating out the best man by 10 hours!

heywhatupboys 3y ago
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- cyrillite 3y ago
  Women can complete a Tour de France. A man will likely be the best athlete in every conceivable category. But, I can’t think of a single sport neither sex could meaningfully compete in if normalised against their own sex.
  - heywhatupboys 3y ago
    > Women can complete a Tour de France. absolutely not. Not a single woman in the world can keep pace with the peloton.
    - loeg 3y ago
      DFL is different from DNF. They could complete the course, no question. I think they could might be able to hang with the men's peloton on some stages, too -- it's an enormous drafting benefit. They wouldn't win climbing stages, wouldn't make breakaways, and wouldn't win sprint finishes.
      - heywhatupboys 3y ago
        > They could complete the course, no question. asking riders to ride for 12 hours a day is inhuman. I could complete the course. The question is in what time.
        cbm-vic-20 3y ago
        And then do it again the next day. And the next. And so on. I don't think I would be able to walk after two back-to-back 100km days, and these guys are doing double that with a lot more climbing nearly every day for over three weeks straight.
      - bbarn 3y ago
        There's always an outlier race here or there, but generally, women can not hold on to men's fields at the pro level. I have seen many pro level women enter men's pro fields just to get the workout, and they get dropped every time unless the fields are tiny. Sure, in the "Pro" category at a local crit, Marianne Vos can beat most or all of the men, but in that same race if a top men's pro racer showed up, they'd lap the field.
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  And the women who ride represent the top 0.00001% of Earth's best humans in the best shape too! And their accomplishments outside any effort that the vast amount of people will ever do in a day of their lives. Of course women can complete such races! We know this because they do it all the time. Not only that, they can even win! All we need to do is let them. Take the RAAM (Race Across America, a gruelling almost 3000 mile race, nearly 5000km). Women are allowed to join in. This is even longer than the Tour. Not only have many women finished RAAM, in Leah Goldstein actually won. Not the women's category. The race outright. Period. Or the Transcontinental Race (TRC, similar to RAAM but across Europe and without a support team, between 3000-4000km depending on the year). Not only have many women participated and completed it, in 2019 a Fiona Kolbinger won. And again, not the women's category. She won the 10 day race beating out the best man by 10 hours! Both of these races show that not only can women complete the men's Tour, they could end up setting better times. > But they will not, and cannot, EVER, be asked to ride what the men's teams do. It is just too harmfull. And impossible. I hope that the clear evidence I gave you, the fact that women have done far more than this, and have beaten the world's best men while doing it, will make you reconsider your position in the future. It's not backed by evidence, it's just prejudice.
  - loeg 3y ago
    Women can definitely complete the same distances/courses the men do, but they would probably not be competitive in a mixed field TdF. They just don't have the W/kg for a climbing stage and they don't have the raw W/CdA for a sprint finish podium. (The ultra/bikepacking races you mention are a completely different format to the TdF.) I support your idea of not explicitly forbidding mixed fields, but I suspect it won't happen even without a rule against it.
    - light_hue_1 3y ago
      I don't know. We won't know until it happens! But we aren't even at the not forbidding mixed fields stage in cycling. We're at the "women aren't allowed to ride races of the same length as men" stage even in their own competitions.
- Dave_Rosenthal 3y ago
  I took the OP not as saying that they thought women should race simultaneously with the men (no, they don't have the same power). I thought they were just advocating for the women's TDF to have the same course as the men. That is, 21 long stages with lots of vertical feet, etc. Women would have no issue with such a course!
  - loeg 3y ago
    > I took the OP not as saying that they thought women should race simultaneously with the men (no, they don't have the same power). I think light_hue is seriously arguing for mixed fields in the same race. E.g., they wrote: > Of course women can complete such races! We know this because they do it all the time. Not only that, they can even win! All we need to do is let them.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
The format of the race makes it very difficult to have two separate categories (men and women), IMHO. They could indeed open the race to anyone so that both men and women could compete in the race, but then women would trail men and have no chance of winning. This means they would also have to impose a number of women per team as otherwise no team would hire women. So it's not a simple issue.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Couldn't they run two races concurrently on the same roads, ranked separately? Moot point if the women don't actually want this though.
- jimbokun 3y ago
  What if they staggered it and just had the women starting each stage a day behind? (Or vice versa.)
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Are women actually disallowed from competing in the men’s version?
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  Yes. According to UCI rules women are not allowed to compete in the men's race. And women are not allowed to organize a race with the same length as the men. Even just for themselves. Even though women compete in races like RAAM (Race Across America, ~5000km) and the Transcontinental Race (TCR, ~3500km) and have actually beaten the men at them. Those aren't UCI races because they wouldn't be allowed to join if they were.
  - bbarn 3y ago
    RAAM is a pure endurance event, and it also tends to attract mostly older athletes. Not to take away from Leah's achievement, but it's a much different animal than a high speed road race. The men's fields are consistently much faster overall and in finishing speeds than women's fields in group races. Women in the US are still allowed to race a category lower in the men's fields and even then a win is incredibly rare for a woman in a men's field - and usually only happens at the category 4 level in men's racing with an exceptional category 3 woman.
  - kolbe 3y ago
    You're citing amateur races with hobbyist athletes, not professional caliber ones. It's very disingenuous of you to pick these examples when objective measurable long distance data is abundant.
conradfr 3y ago
> The women's Tour didn't even exist before 2022 That's not exactly true, there has been many variation of it before its return in 2022. Jeannie Longo was (is?) a quite popular rider in France (despite doping affairs).
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  > That's not exactly true, there has been many variation of it before its return in 2022. The history is somewhat more complicated, but not less sexist. "Tour de France Femmes" has only existed since 2022. You're right that there were other races, some officially related to the Tour, some unofficially related. There was the 1955 women's tour and the 1984-1990 tours which kept getting shorter because the owner of the Tour did not want to include women. Eventually they killed off the format and organizers weren't even allowed to stage their own. There were basically bootleg races under a different name (The Grande Boucle) in the 90s and early 2000s. This messy history underscores one thing: women just want equality with men. Just let them ride the same race.
  - jacurtis 3y ago
    I don't know why the UCI doesn't just have a women's event alongside the men's event each day. In motorsports (like the "24 hours of Le Mans" for example), we see organizers running multiple races at the same time. We have hypercars racing at the same time on the track as the GT3 cars. hell, this year they even let Nascar run a car in its own class along side the other cars. In my example the results are still separated. The hypercars aren't competing against the GT3 cars, they are just all riding the same organized event. The commentators routinely rotate through the event to capitalize on viewers watching to see all of the events. This way the governing body gets the best of all worlds. They only have to host 1 event, but they get entry fees for hundreds of participants across many classifications. Those offering coverage can pool together people that might be interested in several different classifications and only have to pay for the expenses of one broadcast, while pooling together all of the viewers for maximum ad revenue. It is also good, because smaller classifications (like the single-car Nascar entry) can compete on the same track and same event to bolster interest in their sport. Everybody wins! I don't know why the UCI doesn't do the same thing. Let the women and the men race together. They could still have different classifications if they wanted to, but they would only need to support 1 event. The television coverage is already there and it might bring in new viewers that are interested in a women's event, which bolsters ad and sponsorship revenues. Furthermore they can get more entree fees from teams, to further support the costs of the event. It has to be far cheaper than trying to run two events, while also getting better coverage and interest.
jacurtis 3y ago
Cycling is very sexist. But to play devils advocate: There has been a women's Tour de France for a while. It existed between 1984 and 2009. It struggled financially that whole time and was never profitable to the UCI. They canceled it in 2009 and brought it back in 2014 through 2021 as a single day event in Paris on the same days as the men's final day. The UCI was been exploring bringing back a multi-stage women's event for at least the past several years but they had been unable to nail down a title sponsor. Apparently Skoda (the primary men's sponsor) was in early negotiations to sponsor it in 2020, for the 2021 season but then dropped out because of COVID uncertainty. The break last year finally came because of Zwift (who financially performed well during Covid) offered to sponsor the event as a title sponsor. NBC did a lot to support and promote them as well. So we are seeing progress. There was a lot of criticism around it only being 8 stages compared to the 24 of the mens, but most of the women actually said 8 stages was plenty because that is larger than any of their other tours (I think tied with Giro d'italia). Progress is happening is my point. With that being said, yes there is significant sexism still prominent in all sports, and cycling too. The UCI is following the money, and to their credit they have been honest about that. They have routinely said, there isn't enough money in the women's sports and that's why they don't pursue it. What we need is for the UCI to recognize the potential in women's cycling and to invest in it, knowing it might not be immediately profitable, but that over time it will gain popularity like the men's events and become profitable for them. Luckily Zwift seems to be willing to take this role for now. Time will tell. But the good news is that TdF Femmes (women's) is back for 2023. So maybe we at the beginning of what will eventually lead to a happy ending.
- Shaanie 3y ago
  Isn't it a bit strange to say "they should invest in it because over time it'll become profitable" if they previously had it for 25 years without it ever becoming profitable?
powera 3y ago
Come on. Taking the Tourmalet (one of the recent climbs on the TDF) at Strava [https://www.strava.com/segments/4951896 https://www.strava.com/segments/4951896], the fastest time for men was 47 minutes while the fastest time for women was 56 minutes. Women do a shorter race because they are slower over the same distance.
bbarn 3y ago
I think you'll find in reality most people in the sport are strong advocates of women's racing, including the UCI - who you surely know does not put on the tour de france. It's up to ASO to design the tour format(who admittedly has the UCI basically under their control). Also, while you're correct about women endurance in general, the tour de france is not really an endurance race. It's 21 different races, some of them endurance, some of them all out sprints, some of them all out time trials. As someone who lives with a category 1 woman racer, and has been involved in the sport for 16 years, women do not recover as quickly as men do. Someone will still win the race of course, and it will still be fun to watch, but the repeated efforts do effect women differently than men. In my experience, very few of the women racing actually want longer distances. When I was involved with putting on races, one or two loud voices would advocate for it, but come the day of the event, races that were equal length in the pro/cat 1 fields would have dismal attendance if they were the same length as the pro/cat 1 men's fields. Of those that did show up, the abandon rate was much higher than normal for those same local fields at other races. We even went as far as surveying all the teams and racers before one stage race, and overwhelmingly the women did not want the men's length (for road races) and times (for criteriums). Admittedly, at the pro-tour level this might be different, but to get to the pro tour level, racers must start in amateur and local pro levels. We mandated equal pay outs at the state level, and some races dropped off the calendar because their budgets couldn't support it (or lowered men's payouts to compensate). Those that didn't saw no increase in attendance in women's fields after the increase either. That wasn't really a surprise, as most people are motivated more by the racing itself than some payout until you get to pro-tour levels. Men and women both effectively pay for the privilege to race in all but the most elite fields. More than being sexist, cycling is incredibly classist. The equipment is obscenely expensive, and the time it takes to train and get better is out of reach for most people with "normal" jobs. The funnel of junior racers coming in decreases every year, and the only fields we see growth in are masters categories (who can actually afford to race).
petre 3y ago
Women are cycling just fine in less visible non-UCI endurance events like the Tour Divide and in cyclocross and XCO events. See Lael Wilcox who established a FKT in 2021 on the Tour Divide. I'm also happy to see more African athteles in TdF and sad to see team Qhubeca go (I've got one of their caps), but such is life. The womens' TdF will probably become more diversified as well if there are sponsors. It's a start. TdF is too commercial but it's still nice, even with the doping scandals in the not so distant past. Check out last year's womens' Paris Roubaix documentary on YT. I think Specialized paid for it, my memory is a bit foggy. Also encourage the women around you to pick up cycling, even for the sake of keeping in shape. It's quite rewarding and also helps a lot mentally. While cycling through the forest, I met a woman walking her dog and asked for directions. She was quite happy to chat and she also told me she stopped riding the bike after an accident she had. I encouraged her to try again and told her I had several accidents myself, but there is still much to gain from cycling after getting over trauma.
tokai 3y ago
It was my understanding that the riders of the women peleton does not want longer stages.[0] With the depth of the quite young pro womens peleton, longer and harder races limits the field of potential winners to a few of the very-top riders. Maybe it will change as the rider pipeline with junior cycling catches up to the recent expansion of womens pro cycling, but right now the shorter stages does make for more entertaining racing. [0] https://www.cyclingweekly.com/racing/more-exciting-when-its-shorter-riders-question-tours-longest-stage https://www.cyclingweekly.com/racing/more-exciting-when-its-...

heywhatupboys 3y ago

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cyrillite 3y ago
Women can complete a Tour de France. A man will likely be the best athlete in every conceivable category. But, I can’t think of a single sport neither sex could meaningfully compete in if normalised against their own sex.
- heywhatupboys 3y ago
  > Women can complete a Tour de France. absolutely not. Not a single woman in the world can keep pace with the peloton.
  - loeg 3y ago
    DFL is different from DNF. They could complete the course, no question. I think they could might be able to hang with the men's peloton on some stages, too -- it's an enormous drafting benefit. They wouldn't win climbing stages, wouldn't make breakaways, and wouldn't win sprint finishes.
    - heywhatupboys 3y ago
      > They could complete the course, no question. asking riders to ride for 12 hours a day is inhuman. I could complete the course. The question is in what time.
      - cbm-vic-20 3y ago
        And then do it again the next day. And the next. And so on. I don't think I would be able to walk after two back-to-back 100km days, and these guys are doing double that with a lot more climbing nearly every day for over three weeks straight.
    - bbarn 3y ago
      There's always an outlier race here or there, but generally, women can not hold on to men's fields at the pro level. I have seen many pro level women enter men's pro fields just to get the workout, and they get dropped every time unless the fields are tiny. Sure, in the "Pro" category at a local crit, Marianne Vos can beat most or all of the men, but in that same race if a top men's pro racer showed up, they'd lap the field.
light_hue_1 3y ago
And the women who ride represent the top 0.00001% of Earth's best humans in the best shape too! And their accomplishments outside any effort that the vast amount of people will ever do in a day of their lives. Of course women can complete such races! We know this because they do it all the time. Not only that, they can even win! All we need to do is let them. Take the RAAM (Race Across America, a gruelling almost 3000 mile race, nearly 5000km). Women are allowed to join in. This is even longer than the Tour. Not only have many women finished RAAM, in Leah Goldstein actually won. Not the women's category. The race outright. Period. Or the Transcontinental Race (TRC, similar to RAAM but across Europe and without a support team, between 3000-4000km depending on the year). Not only have many women participated and completed it, in 2019 a Fiona Kolbinger won. And again, not the women's category. She won the 10 day race beating out the best man by 10 hours! Both of these races show that not only can women complete the men's Tour, they could end up setting better times. > But they will not, and cannot, EVER, be asked to ride what the men's teams do. It is just too harmfull. And impossible. I hope that the clear evidence I gave you, the fact that women have done far more than this, and have beaten the world's best men while doing it, will make you reconsider your position in the future. It's not backed by evidence, it's just prejudice.
- loeg 3y ago
  Women can definitely complete the same distances/courses the men do, but they would probably not be competitive in a mixed field TdF. They just don't have the W/kg for a climbing stage and they don't have the raw W/CdA for a sprint finish podium. (The ultra/bikepacking races you mention are a completely different format to the TdF.) I support your idea of not explicitly forbidding mixed fields, but I suspect it won't happen even without a rule against it.
  - light_hue_1 3y ago
    I don't know. We won't know until it happens! But we aren't even at the not forbidding mixed fields stage in cycling. We're at the "women aren't allowed to ride races of the same length as men" stage even in their own competitions.
Dave_Rosenthal 3y ago
I took the OP not as saying that they thought women should race simultaneously with the men (no, they don't have the same power). I thought they were just advocating for the women's TDF to have the same course as the men. That is, 21 long stages with lots of vertical feet, etc. Women would have no issue with such a course!
- loeg 3y ago
  > I took the OP not as saying that they thought women should race simultaneously with the men (no, they don't have the same power). I think light_hue is seriously arguing for mixed fields in the same race. E.g., they wrote: > Of course women can complete such races! We know this because they do it all the time. Not only that, they can even win! All we need to do is let them.

mytailorisrich 3y ago

The format of the race makes it very difficult to have two separate categories (men and women), IMHO. They could indeed open the race to anyone so that both men and women could compete in the race, but then women would trail men and have no chance of winning. This means they would also have to impose a number of women per team as otherwise no team would hire women. So it's not a simple issue.

mcpackieh 3y ago
Couldn't they run two races concurrently on the same roads, ranked separately? Moot point if the women don't actually want this though.
jimbokun 3y ago
What if they staggered it and just had the women starting each stage a day behind? (Or vice versa.)

pfannkuchen 3y ago

Are women actually disallowed from competing in the men’s version?

light_hue_1 3y ago
Yes. According to UCI rules women are not allowed to compete in the men's race. And women are not allowed to organize a race with the same length as the men. Even just for themselves. Even though women compete in races like RAAM (Race Across America, ~5000km) and the Transcontinental Race (TCR, ~3500km) and have actually beaten the men at them. Those aren't UCI races because they wouldn't be allowed to join if they were.
- bbarn 3y ago
  RAAM is a pure endurance event, and it also tends to attract mostly older athletes. Not to take away from Leah's achievement, but it's a much different animal than a high speed road race. The men's fields are consistently much faster overall and in finishing speeds than women's fields in group races. Women in the US are still allowed to race a category lower in the men's fields and even then a win is incredibly rare for a woman in a men's field - and usually only happens at the category 4 level in men's racing with an exceptional category 3 woman.
- kolbe 3y ago
  You're citing amateur races with hobbyist athletes, not professional caliber ones. It's very disingenuous of you to pick these examples when objective measurable long distance data is abundant.

conradfr 3y ago

> The women's Tour didn't even exist before 2022 That's not exactly true, there has been many variation of it before its return in 2022. Jeannie Longo was (is?) a quite popular rider in France (despite doping affairs).

light_hue_1 3y ago
> That's not exactly true, there has been many variation of it before its return in 2022. The history is somewhat more complicated, but not less sexist. "Tour de France Femmes" has only existed since 2022. You're right that there were other races, some officially related to the Tour, some unofficially related. There was the 1955 women's tour and the 1984-1990 tours which kept getting shorter because the owner of the Tour did not want to include women. Eventually they killed off the format and organizers weren't even allowed to stage their own. There were basically bootleg races under a different name (The Grande Boucle) in the 90s and early 2000s. This messy history underscores one thing: women just want equality with men. Just let them ride the same race.
- jacurtis 3y ago
  I don't know why the UCI doesn't just have a women's event alongside the men's event each day. In motorsports (like the "24 hours of Le Mans" for example), we see organizers running multiple races at the same time. We have hypercars racing at the same time on the track as the GT3 cars. hell, this year they even let Nascar run a car in its own class along side the other cars. In my example the results are still separated. The hypercars aren't competing against the GT3 cars, they are just all riding the same organized event. The commentators routinely rotate through the event to capitalize on viewers watching to see all of the events. This way the governing body gets the best of all worlds. They only have to host 1 event, but they get entry fees for hundreds of participants across many classifications. Those offering coverage can pool together people that might be interested in several different classifications and only have to pay for the expenses of one broadcast, while pooling together all of the viewers for maximum ad revenue. It is also good, because smaller classifications (like the single-car Nascar entry) can compete on the same track and same event to bolster interest in their sport. Everybody wins! I don't know why the UCI doesn't do the same thing. Let the women and the men race together. They could still have different classifications if they wanted to, but they would only need to support 1 event. The television coverage is already there and it might bring in new viewers that are interested in a women's event, which bolsters ad and sponsorship revenues. Furthermore they can get more entree fees from teams, to further support the costs of the event. It has to be far cheaper than trying to run two events, while also getting better coverage and interest.

jacurtis 3y ago

Cycling is very sexist. But to play devils advocate: There has been a women's Tour de France for a while. It existed between 1984 and 2009. It struggled financially that whole time and was never profitable to the UCI. They canceled it in 2009 and brought it back in 2014 through 2021 as a single day event in Paris on the same days as the men's final day. The UCI was been exploring bringing back a multi-stage women's event for at least the past several years but they had been unable to nail down a title sponsor. Apparently Skoda (the primary men's sponsor) was in early negotiations to sponsor it in 2020, for the 2021 season but then dropped out because of COVID uncertainty. The break last year finally came because of Zwift (who financially performed well during Covid) offered to sponsor the event as a title sponsor. NBC did a lot to support and promote them as well. So we are seeing progress. There was a lot of criticism around it only being 8 stages compared to the 24 of the mens, but most of the women actually said 8 stages was plenty because that is larger than any of their other tours (I think tied with Giro d'italia). Progress is happening is my point. With that being said, yes there is significant sexism still prominent in all sports, and cycling too. The UCI is following the money, and to their credit they have been honest about that. They have routinely said, there isn't enough money in the women's sports and that's why they don't pursue it. What we need is for the UCI to recognize the potential in women's cycling and to invest in it, knowing it might not be immediately profitable, but that over time it will gain popularity like the men's events and become profitable for them. Luckily Zwift seems to be willing to take this role for now. Time will tell. But the good news is that TdF Femmes (women's) is back for 2023. So maybe we at the beginning of what will eventually lead to a happy ending.

Shaanie 3y ago
Isn't it a bit strange to say "they should invest in it because over time it'll become profitable" if they previously had it for 25 years without it ever becoming profitable?

powera 3y ago

Come on. Taking the Tourmalet (one of the recent climbs on the TDF) at Strava [https://www.strava.com/segments/4951896 https://www.strava.com/segments/4951896], the fastest time for men was 47 minutes while the fastest time for women was 56 minutes. Women do a shorter race because they are slower over the same distance.

bbarn 3y ago

I think you'll find in reality most people in the sport are strong advocates of women's racing, including the UCI - who you surely know does not put on the tour de france. It's up to ASO to design the tour format(who admittedly has the UCI basically under their control). Also, while you're correct about women endurance in general, the tour de france is not really an endurance race. It's 21 different races, some of them endurance, some of them all out sprints, some of them all out time trials. As someone who lives with a category 1 woman racer, and has been involved in the sport for 16 years, women do not recover as quickly as men do. Someone will still win the race of course, and it will still be fun to watch, but the repeated efforts do effect women differently than men. In my experience, very few of the women racing actually want longer distances. When I was involved with putting on races, one or two loud voices would advocate for it, but come the day of the event, races that were equal length in the pro/cat 1 fields would have dismal attendance if they were the same length as the pro/cat 1 men's fields. Of those that did show up, the abandon rate was much higher than normal for those same local fields at other races. We even went as far as surveying all the teams and racers before one stage race, and overwhelmingly the women did not want the men's length (for road races) and times (for criteriums). Admittedly, at the pro-tour level this might be different, but to get to the pro tour level, racers must start in amateur and local pro levels. We mandated equal pay outs at the state level, and some races dropped off the calendar because their budgets couldn't support it (or lowered men's payouts to compensate). Those that didn't saw no increase in attendance in women's fields after the increase either. That wasn't really a surprise, as most people are motivated more by the racing itself than some payout until you get to pro-tour levels. Men and women both effectively pay for the privilege to race in all but the most elite fields. More than being sexist, cycling is incredibly classist. The equipment is obscenely expensive, and the time it takes to train and get better is out of reach for most people with "normal" jobs. The funnel of junior racers coming in decreases every year, and the only fields we see growth in are masters categories (who can actually afford to race).

petre 3y ago

Women are cycling just fine in less visible non-UCI endurance events like the Tour Divide and in cyclocross and XCO events. See Lael Wilcox who established a FKT in 2021 on the Tour Divide. I'm also happy to see more African athteles in TdF and sad to see team Qhubeca go (I've got one of their caps), but such is life. The womens' TdF will probably become more diversified as well if there are sponsors. It's a start. TdF is too commercial but it's still nice, even with the doping scandals in the not so distant past. Check out last year's womens' Paris Roubaix documentary on YT. I think Specialized paid for it, my memory is a bit foggy. Also encourage the women around you to pick up cycling, even for the sake of keeping in shape. It's quite rewarding and also helps a lot mentally. While cycling through the forest, I met a woman walking her dog and asked for directions. She was quite happy to chat and she also told me she stopped riding the bike after an accident she had. I encouraged her to try again and told her I had several accidents myself, but there is still much to gain from cycling after getting over trauma.

tokai 3y ago

It was my understanding that the riders of the women peleton does not want longer stages.[0] With the depth of the quite young pro womens peleton, longer and harder races limits the field of potential winners to a few of the very-top riders. Maybe it will change as the rider pipeline with junior cycling catches up to the recent expansion of womens pro cycling, but right now the shorter stages does make for more entertaining racing. [0] https://www.cyclingweekly.com/racing/more-exciting-when-its-shorter-riders-question-tours-longest-stage https://www.cyclingweekly.com/racing/more-exciting-when-its-...