The mud has settled on the white gravel roads that performed host to a stage of the first official ladies’s Tour de France in over thirty years. The publicity caravan autos are again in storage and the riders are on to their subsequent spherical of races.
For individuals who’ve spent years campaigning for a ladies’s occasion with the identical iconic clout because the Tour de France, it’s nonetheless exhausting to consider that ASO (which owns and runs the race) actually, lastly did what they claimed for therefore lengthy was, for financial and logistical causes, an inconceivable ask.
It was due to a 2013 marketing campaign led by riders Kathryn Bertine, Marianne Vos and Emma Pooley, and Ironman triathlete Chrissie Wellington and a petition that raised greater than 97,000 signatures that ASO lastly created La Course. This one-day race held through the Tour sometimes stretched to 2 days and struggled to know what it was. Was it a cobbled criterium on the Champs Elysées? A one-day race within the mountains? A devil-take-the hindmost mountain TT hybrid?
No matter it was, it ran for eight years, however by no means developed into a correct stage race as riders, campaigners and followers had hoped.
A second wave marketing campaign was led by Donnons des Elles au Vélo, which roughly interprets as ‘Let’s give biking some ladies’, however which can be a pun on ‘let’s give biking wings’. This was organised by a gaggle of primarily French cyclists from a membership within the Parisian suburb of Courcouronnes and commenced in 2015 however actually gained traction from 2018 onwards. The ladies, who’re joined by riders from overseas, rode all the route of the Tour de France a day forward of the race, with a purpose to exhibit that girls are completely able to confronting the identical lengthy distances and difficulties, over three weeks, as the lads. The in depth press protection their marketing campaign generated within the mainstream media—the place the debate over the professionals and cons of a three-week ladies’s race was a lot much less nuanced—had the impact of creating ASO seem like its administrators had been nonetheless caught in a Nineteen Eighties time warp.
The impression that the ASO merely didn’t care, and maybe solely grudgingly ran La Course, was bolstered by the scant consideration paid to the race by the French sports activities newspaper l’Equipe, which belongs to the identical enterprise empire. By 2019, La Course had grow to be one of the prestigious in the future races on the ladies’s calendar, but when Annemiek van Vleuten gained it in thrilling model by chasing down Anna van der Breggen, the next day’s print version provided a mere two paragraph abstract. The idea was that readers could be extra interested by a few columns of protection of a tiresome spat between two has-beens of the Armstrong doping period.
So when, that very same summer time, Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme all of the sudden introduced that ASO had been critically contemplating choices for making a ladies’s model of the race, there was a normal temper of ‘we’ll consider it after we see it’ in campaigners’ responses. And when the race particulars had been lastly revealed on the Tour de France presentation final yr, with the information that it could ship excess of a cursory three phases like the ladies’s Vuelta (additionally organised by ASO) many of the stakeholders in ladies’s racing had been left, for need of a greater phrase, gobsmacked. This was eight phases, with gravel and two huge days within the mountains, a serious sponsor within the form of Zwift and with a star race director within the form of TV commentator and ex-rider, Marion Rousse.
Does the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift mark a watershed second in ladies’s racing? Or is it the icing on the cake of a cultural shift that has already occurred?
Anybody who has adopted ladies’s racing during the last 5, ten years, will know that the game has modified, virtually past recognition. Whereas there’s nonetheless a really lengthy method to go to attain a fairer steadiness by way of challenges, broadcast protection, monetary safety and prize cash, the very concept of striving for parity is not laughed off as a infantile fantasy. The Overton window has shifted, and girls’s racing has grow to be an necessary a part of the narrative within the biking media in a manner that was unimaginable even 5 years in the past.
Maybe essentially the most hanging illustration of that got here on the finish of final yr when Deceuninck-QuickStep workforce boss Patrick Lefevere went from declaring, “I’m not a welfare centre” when requested if he’d create a ladies’s workforce, to shortly afterwards asserting his intentions of creating a workforce that might be a part of the WWT ranks from 2023 onwards. Such a dramatic flip of occasions would merely have been inconceivable, even two years in the past. What triggered the change of coronary heart? Cash. Or, extra exactly, a sponsor defection, with Deceuninck, a Belgian window producer, taking its money to a different Belgian workforce, Alpecin-Fenix (now Alpecin-Deceuninck) and explaining to press the choice was made on account of the opposite workforce’s dedication to creating a powerful ladies’s workforce.
Lefevere’s workforce is about as macho as males’s groups get—they name themselves the Wolfpack, and wrestle to make significant apologies for riders’ transgressions (keep in mind Iljo Keisse’s lewd gesture behind a waitress). So when the boss begins making beneficial feedback about ladies’s racing, one thing’s up.
The hope with the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is that it’s going to convey ladies’s racing to the following stage, attracting a a lot wider viewers, the identical one which tunes in every year in July, makes a day of it with a road-side picnic, and whose children dream at night time of in the future carrying a yellow, inexperienced or polka dot jersey. It’s additionally this large but informal viewers, that’s neither predominantly male or feminine, younger nor outdated, that biking’s largest sponsors hope to achieve with a purpose to promote rest room fixtures, financial institution accounts, finances lodge lodging, snacks, detergent, theme parks and flooring. With out these sponsors, skilled bike racing wouldn’t exist.
#MeToo
Many components have contributed to the rising curiosity within the ladies’s aspect of the game, however there are actually key moments and choices which have acted as catalysts. The #MeToo motion that started in 2006 and reached a peak in 2017 when quite a few allegations emerged of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s crimes of sexual abuse, has had a dramatic affect on ladies’s sport typically, with excessive profile athletes speaking about their very own experiences with abusive coaches. In a broader sense, it put a magnifying glass on the male chauvinism that has slowed the pure progress of so many ladies’s sports activities, amongst which biking appears notably affected. Think about the 1984 Olympics, which marked the primary ladies’s biking occasion with a street race, but additionally the primary marathon for feminine runners and a key stage within the reintroduction, after a really lengthy hiatus, of ladies’s and males’s tennis. If we take that Olympics as a ‘yr zero’ for these sports activities, how is it that girls’s tennis and distance working have progressed to the purpose the place the nice champions are family names with profitable sponsorship offers, but non biking followers wrestle to call even one nice feminine rider?
#MeToo has made a major distinction to the way in which ladies’s sport is seen and consumed. The primary time the French launched a ladies’s award on the celebrated ‘Ballon d’Or’ finish of yr occasion for footballers in 2018, winner Ada Hegeberg was requested by the occasion’s DJ if she “knew the best way to twerk” to which she replied “no” and appeared prepared to go away the stage. The storm that adopted within the press and on social media urged a watershed second: no, you may not scale back supreme sports activities ladies to the standing of ornamental eye-candy for males to lust over, and count on to get away with it.
And who remembers the times within the early 2000s when ladies’s workforce riders had been photographed like calendar women, with heavy eye make-up and blow-dried hair, and requested to pose provocatively? Who remembers the time when conventionally fairly riders acquired extra media consideration than those that had been much less photogenic, but had achieved considerably extra?
In 2016 the Guardian performed a survey throughout Girls’s Sports activities Week which discovered that only one.8% of all of the articles that appeared within the sports activities pages of the nationwide newspapers that week had been written by ladies, and that out of 1,899 images revealed in those self same pages, solely 3.4% had been of ladies. When the Day by day Telegraph turned the primary broadsheet newspaper to dedicate a complete complement to ladies’s sport in 2019, creating an area for in-depth interviews and stories, it was one other signifier of an necessary cultural shift.
The Telegraph’s dedication to ladies’s sport has been accompanied by a extra delicate but influential resolution in most elements of the biking press to dedicate extra consideration to ladies’s racing, by appointing devoted editors, doing women-themed points, or just growing the quantity of protection of the game. In parallel with this development we’ve seen an elevated presence of ladies’s voices inside biking journalism. Whereas just a few years in the past ladies had been a rarity within the Tour de France press room, a fast head depend on stage 4 of the Tour de France Femmes revealed 39 males and 16 ladies – or a ratio of round 5:2.
After all, we’re not in some segregated Nineteen Fifties faculty state of affairs the place the boys sit on one aspect of the category with their woodwork and the women sit on the opposite aspect with their knitting. Fortunately there are ladies reporting on males’s races and males reporting on ladies’s races – giving biking journalism an more and more wealthy timbre of voices and opinions. Merely having the ladies’s presence within the room helps to alter the tradition.
Have beloved working with these women this week. #TDFF pic.twitter.com/7LoaUMHo98July 30, 2022
And the necessary level in regards to the elevated protection of ladies’s racing, is that persons are studying it.
9 years in the past, I keep in mind having a dialogue with a British biking journal in regards to the concept of doing a complete concern devoted to ladies’s racing. I labored up a difficulty’s value of strategies, and along with a receptive editor there was a interval of back-and forth, pooling and fine-tuning concepts. However ultimately phrase got here again that the writer wouldn’t go for it, as a result of ‘it could by no means promote’. Final yr, nonetheless, when Rouleur Journal lastly devoted a complete concern to ladies, guest-edited by the TV presenter and biking journalist Orla Chennaoui, it turned the journal’s biggest-selling concern, going into three print runs. That stage of curiosity was not a one-off. As Chennaoui not too long ago reported in the identical journal, its e-newsletter dedicated to Paris Roubaix Femmes had some the best ranges of engagement of any of the digital tales within the journal’s historical past. The curiosity is there.
Cyclingnews‘ Girls’s Editor Kirsten Frattini coordinates international ladies’s biking protection, and has overseen vital progress up to now 5 years alone, notably the publication’s ladies’s biking content material has seen document annual figures that greater than doubled in 2021.
Print is one factor, however it may solely go to date. Essentially the most attention-grabbing proof of a shift comes from watching the impact of elevated TV protection of ladies’s racing.
Discovering an viewers on tv
As Daam van Reeth, an Affiliate Professor of Economics on the College of Louvain factors out in his forthcoming guide, The Economics of Skilled Street Biking (Springer, October 2022): “As much as 2014, in most European nations at finest three ladies’s races a yr had been being coated reside on TV: the World Championships street race, the Nationwide Championships street race and, each 4 years, the Olympic street race. Different high ladies’s races simply acquired a brief abstract broadcast at finest, earlier than or after the lads’s competitors had completed. The introduction of La Course (2014) and the Madrid Problem (2015), broadcast to a worldwide viewers beneath the umbrella of, respectively, the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España, was the primary signal of change.”
In 2016, the UCI changed the Girls’s World Cup with the World Tour, making a two-tier system in racing with the extra prestigious races required to supply at the very least 45 minutes of broadcast protection.
By 2018, Eurosport coated 15 out of the 22 ladies’s World Tour races reaching a cumulative whole of 5 million viewers throughout all its territories. By 2021, in some European nations you may watch round 12 ladies’s races on public service channels. [1]
The UCI stipulating that WWT races should now be broadcast and policing that call by stripping final yr’s Giro Donne of its WWT standing when it failed to supply sufficient protection, has been essential. How are you going to grow to be a fan when you can’t even watch a race?
Van Reeth recurrently posts broadcast figures for males’s and girls’s races on Twitter, notably for The Netherlands and Belgium. Every now and then the ladies’s occasions draw higher viewer figures than the lads’s, however even after they don’t, the audiences are often inside a spread of 60% to 90% of the lads’s, which is exceptional given how a lot much less the ladies’s peloton is thought, with the consequence that the narratives of its rivalries are much less acquainted. Much more remarkably, in cyclo-cross the ladies’s races routinely entice greater TV audiences in Belgium than the lads’s. Maybe simply as astonishingly, the demographic watching these ladies’s races is predominantly older males: the very viewers you is likely to be forgiven for assuming as least engaged in ladies’s sport. This demographic applies to males’s racing too, which means that if the viewers is similar, then the place followers are involved, biking shouldn’t be a segregated sport. Or in different phrases, ladies’s racing isn’t solely of curiosity to ladies and teenage women, as is commonly assumed.
It additionally means that the viewers for racing on TV, which drives sponsorship, will dwindle because it will get older and that the economic system of biking must urgently work out new methods of participating youthful audiences if it desires to thrive sooner or later.
It’s value declaring right here that the ladies’s peloton has been fast to embrace the chances of social media, having been largely ignored by the normal sports activities media for greater than 100 years… If we discover that the position of social media will grow to be more and more necessary within the economic system of motorcycle racing, then ladies are already in pole place to revenue from that shift. Immediately’s feminine riders are discovering an viewers instantly on Twitter and Instagram, posting coaching clips, selfies, jokes and tales from inside their races. Even when you’d by no means watched Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig’s punchy manner of racing previous to her magnificent stage 3 victory on the Tour de France Femmes, you’d certainly have come throughout her comedian, emotional and endearing post-race interviews, the fabric for a thousand memes.
To return to the TV statistics, nonetheless, it’s essential to do not forget that they hardly ever inform the entire story when quoted in isolation. Van Reeth factors out that that exterior components can affect viewer figures, past an viewers’s need to observe a race. Extra folks watch TV on Sundays than on Saturdays, for instance, so when occasions just like the World Championships schedule ladies’s occasions on a Saturday and the lads’s on a Sunday, the information will not be a completely truthful reflection of curiosity.
Moreover, not all TV protection is equal. When viewers can solely watch a race through a paid subscription service, viewer figures are a lot decrease. Van Reeth affords a dramatic illustration of this level with the French knowledge for Milan-San Remo in 2021. In 2020 the race was free to observe on La Chaine l’Equipe: in 2021 it may solely be watched through a paid subscription service with Eurosport Participant. As a consequence, viewer figures dropped by greater than 98%, from 1,073,000 to twenty,000.
An experiment with scheduling performed in 2020 by Flanders Classics—organisers of the Ronde van Vlaanderen and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad amongst others—and the Belgian broadcaster Sporza, noticed the lads’s and girls’s races being held on the identical day, however with the lads ending first, somewhat than the ladies offering a morning ‘appetizer’ which has traditionally been the norm when organisers run males’s and girls’s occasions on the identical day. That yr, the Ronde van Vlaanderen recorded the best ever viewer figures in Flanders for a ladies’s race. What’s extra, solely 5 males’s races had increased viewer figures that yr. The Dutch nationwide broadcaster NPO1 recorded an viewers 41% bigger for that very same race than for the lads’s race. In 2021 the Dutch TV viewers for Omloop Het Nieuwsblad was greater than two occasions bigger for the ladies’s race than for the lads’s.
All this demonstrates not solely that there’s an viewers for girls’s races on tv, but additionally that choices on how and when to broadcast them have a major affect on viewers engagement.
The UCI Minimal Wage
The broadcasting of ladies’s races is a part of profound structural adjustments to ladies’s racing led by the UCI.
Maybe the ultimate key to this cultural shift, and the latest and subsequently all of the extra thrilling, is the introduction of a minimal wage for feminine riders. The UCI launched it in 2020 concurrently the COVID-19 pandemic hit, making it a necessary situation for any workforce searching for Girls’s World Tour standing. In 2020 it amounted to €15,000 a yr, and it has risen each subsequent yr to in 2023 attain €32,000, the identical as for males’s Continental groups. Whereas that preliminary tranche was under the nationwide minimal wage for many European nations, there have been many who feared it was an excessive amount of, and that groups would disappear. Nonetheless, regardless of the pandemic and the numerous races cancelled as a consequence, eight groups dedicated to WWT standing in 2020. This yr, the quantity has risen to 14 groups.
It has been the norm, since ladies’s racing began to grow to be professionalised within the Nineteen Eighties, for girls to work on the aspect with a purpose to get by, with inevitable penalties on their racing type and psychological nicely being as they juggled work with coaching and racing. When the lads speak of the sacrifices they make for his or her sport, they don’t know the half of what ladies undergo with a purpose to trip at their finest. Lastly, with the UCI taking motion on ensuring at the very least a good share of the ladies’s peloton will get a residing wage, riders can correctly dedicate themselves to coaching and restoration, and that in flip elevates their racing.
The minimal wage is a part of a package deal of advantages, a few of that are much less publicised, however equally ground-breaking, permitting ladies to have longer careers, from overlaying the prices of medical health insurance, having a workforce physician and providing a pension plan to offering paid maternity depart.
Rising inequality
There’s nonetheless an extended method to go, nonetheless: not for reaching parity with the lads, which stays a distant and maybe unachievable objective, however to easily attain a stage of decency and equity that may permit the ladies’s sport to fulfil its potential. Whereas the Girls’s WorldTour is making a major distinction to some riders’ lives, the remainder of the ladies’s peloton continues to wrestle. A 2017 survey performed by The Cyclists’ Alliance, a union for feminine riders, revealed that 17% of these surveyed earned nothing in any respect. Final yr’s survey confirmed that quantity had elevated to 34%. In 2017 50% of the riders surveyed earned €10,000 or much less. In 2021 that quantity had marginally elevated to 52%.
Whereas the WWT workforce system works nicely for these fortunate sufficient to get on it, the information provides a troubling indication that disparity is rising for these unable to make the leap, and it’s tempting to conclude that these variations had been on show on the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, with a peloton using at two, three and even 4 speeds.
Having a wholesome economic system with the second tier Continental groups shouldn’t be solely about doing the precise factor for these skilled riders, or for a extra balanced and aggressive peloton, but it surely’s additionally important for the game’s future, since these groups create a pathway for rising expertise to develop. And on a associated word, there’s nonetheless little in the way in which of an U23 class stepping stone for younger riders to return up by. As the ladies’s peloton at its sharp finish races sooner and more durable than ever earlier than, the bounce from junior to elite turns into more and more daunting.
Equal prize cash
The information that at all times causes headlines is the disparity in prize cash for equal males’s and girls’s races. In 2021, the talk resurfaced when Anna van der Breggen took residence €930 after successful Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, a mere 5.8% of what Davide Ballerini acquired (€16,00). But because the CEO of Flanders Classics Tomas Van Den Spiegel has identified, equal prize cash solely advantages the winners, whereas his organisation has taken an bold backside up method to assist develop the game as an entire.
The extra urgent priorities, he argues, are to supply broadcast protection of races (which comes at an amazing price to race organisers) and bringing the ladies’s races nearer to the lads’s by way of difficulties and beneficial time slots for TV audiences, as we’ve already seen. On this manner, racing brings in an even bigger viewers and extra sponsorship. His 4 yr plan has been undeniably profitable, and can culminate subsequent season with an equal prize purse within the six in the future races for women and men that Flanders Classics organise.
You could have seen that the title for this piece is borrowed from the promoting slogan for the cigarette model marketed at ladies, Virginia Slims. It was created within the late Sixties and made use of the civil rights actions in America to flatter its goal market, creating the powerfully persuasive notion that each skinny cigarette you smoked was a poke within the eye of the patriarchy. Capitalism at its most shameful, one may argue, after we now know that tobacco corporations had, for the reason that Nineteen Fifties, been completely conscious of the hyperlinks between smoking and lung most cancers. By 1990, between 15%-20% of feminine deaths above the age of 30 within the USA, Canada and Eire had been attributable tobacco consumption.
However that very same model performed a essential position within the improvement of ladies’s tennis, by sponsoring and supporting a breakaway ladies’s tour in America that was led by the nice Billie Jean King, and which set to rectify the stunning disparity in prize funds between the lads’s and girls’s sports activities.
Simply as the ladies’s Tour de France first emerged in 1984 on a wave of social change the place feminism was changing into fashionable somewhat than frighteningly radical, so this yr’s Tour emerges at a second the place exhibiting how a lot you’re doing to advertise equality, inclusion and variety makes a enterprise look hip and forward of the sport. That’s to not deny that the executives behind these choices could genuinely wish to promote social change, however there are company picture and branding advantages too.
As we’ve seen with Deceuninck, with the lads’s groups who at the moment are creating ladies’s groups, and with the arrival of Zwift as a serious sponsor, these progressive manufacturers with their sizeable wallets are accelerating change.
Their funding additionally goes past public relations. We’ve been instructed so typically that girls’s sport loses cash, that the notion has grow to be a ‘given’ in historically male-dominated disciplines. However is it truly true? The economic system of males’s sports activities could also be ten occasions the scale or extra of ladies’s sports activities, however for buyers, they’re additionally perceived as being at or close to their peak. The concept that is more and more gaining foreign money is that girls’s sport is the place the potential progress is, and the bonus for buyers is that it’s extraordinarily low cost.
As Dan Cohen, from the American sports activities advertising firm Octagon not too long ago instructed the Washington Put up, “The stakeholders on the industrial aspect of sports activities are continually trying to find the following frontier, the following progress play. It’s clearly ladies’s sports activities.” In the meantime Kate Veronneau, Zwift’s Director of Girls’s Technique and a former professional bicycle owner herself, made the purpose that, “Girls’s sports activities is trending exhausting as a result of the businesses which have invested in sports activities are seeing fabulous returns”.
In the end it’s the general public that decides whether or not this race has been a hit, and on that entrance, the indicators verify what campaigners have mentioned all alongside: construct it and they’re going to come.
Cyclingnews stories that its engagement from the Tour de France Femmes was the best in for any ladies’s stage race within the web site’s historical past, and that its visits exceeded these for the lads’s Giro d’Italia. VeloNews additionally reported that reader engagement for this TDFF was increased than for the lads’s Giro d’Italia this yr. The Tour de France revealed the race had greater than 5 million viewers and a forty five.6% viewers share on France Télévisions on the ultimate stage of the race, whereas the race as entire reached 20 million viewers in France alone. On a extra anecdotal stage, the massive crowds of spectators that we noticed on the roadsides within the mountains and on the stage finishes present that the curiosity is unquestionably there. After all, this race has all of the novelty worth of being a primary version. Will it wrestle to attain the identical stage of curiosity subsequent yr? Or will it have an excellent greater viewers?
Maybe the clearest indicator of whether or not this race marks a turning level in ladies’s racing, shall be if it correlates with a marked improve in engagement with different ladies’s races. For the second we are able to solely watch and wait.
Very important Statistics in ladies’s racing in 2022
“Most of the people is interested by ladies’s sport. I preserve saying it many times. I consider the press has to grasp that, and that they need to be broadcasting the ladies’s sport as a lot as the lads’s.” Jeannie Longo, speaking on France 3 Alpes TV in 1992.
Monetary metrics
Minimal Wage:
Yr the UCI launched a minimal wage with the creation of a UCI Girls’s World Groups class: 2020
Minimal wage in 2020: €15,000
Minimal wage in 2023: €32,100
Variety of UCI Girls’s World Groups in 2020: 8
Variety of UCI Girls’s World Groups in 2022: 14
Proportion of UCI Girls’s World Groups in 2022 which have both grown out of males’s groups or are related to males’s groups: 64%
Variety of groups which match their ladies’s and males’s beginning salaries: 2 (Trek-Segafredo and Workforce Bike Alternate in 2021)
Yr the French Biking Federation first agreed to concern skilled licences to high tier feminine street cyclists: 2021
Viewers metrics
Instagram followers:
Males’s Giro d’Italia winner Jai Hindley: 45,000
Winner of the 2022 Girls’s Giro Donne and Tour de France Femmes Annemiek van Vleuten: 152,000 (171,000 after 2022 TDFF)
2022 Tour winner Jonas Vingegaard: 159,000 (343,000 after 2022 TDF)
Defending Tour de France champion Tadej Pogačar: 655,000 (722,000 after 2022 TDF)
Girls’s world champion Elisa Balsamo: 50,000
Males’s world champion Julian Alaphilippe: 888,000
Broadcasting knowledge:
Variety of WWT occasions with reside protection in 2016: 10
Variety of ladies’s World Tour races in 2018 that obtained reside broadcast protection: 15 out of 23
Variety of minutes of reside broadcast protection a race wants to supply to have UCI Girls’s World Tour standing in 2022: 45
Variety of UCI WWT races in 2022: 25
Days of racing within the UCI Girls’s World Cup in 2015: 10
Days of racing within the UCI’s Girls’s World Tour, launched in 2016: 35
Days of WWT racing in 2022: 71
Quantity of each day reside protection for the Giro Donne in 2021: half-hour
Quantity of each day reside protection for the Giro Donne in 2022: 2 hours
Approximate worldwide reside TV audiences calculated by Professor Daam Van Reeth based mostly on knowledge provided by broadcasters over a ten-year interval:
Tour de France: 15 – 20 million
Giro d’Italia/Vuelta a España: 4 – 6 million
Paris Good: 1 – 2 million
Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré: 1 – 2 million
Tirreno-Adriatico: 1 – 2 million [2]
Common viewers of TDFF on French TV alone: 2.25 million
Peak viewers in France on stage 8 of Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift on France 3: 5.1 million
Proportion improve of TV viewers of ladies’s races on Flemish TV, between 2019 and 2020: 70% [3]
Variety of tweets within the final twelve months, during which Daam van Reeth (professor of Economics and Enterprise on the KU Leuven with an curiosity within the economics of sport), has reported increased viewing figures within the Netherlands and Flanders for girls’s races over males’s equal occasions: 9
Variety of which had been cyclo-cross: 6
Improve in British males taking an curiosity in ladies’s sport, from 2020 to 2021: 24%
Of that quantity, share of males who attribute their curiosity to broadcast protection: 68% [4]
Proportion of viewers that observe reside males’s Tour de France protection for the gorgeous views: 61%
Proportion of viewers that observe reside broadcast protection of the lads’s Tour de France for the racing: 32% [5]
Then and now
Yr Alfonsina Strada turned solely lady to trip males’s Giro d’Italia: 1924
Variety of phases: 12
General distance: 3,613km
Imply common distance of a stage: 301km
1984 Girls’s Tour de France
Variety of phases: 18
Longest stage: 77.8km
General distance: 1066.45km
Variety of groups: 6
Variety of riders: 36
Common pace: 35.967 km/h
Girls’s Tour de France 1985, that includes riders who had been at Olympics in 1984
Variety of phases: 12 (race A) & 5 (race B) for a complete of 17
Longest stage: 104km
Distance: 1230.5km
Variety of groups: 12
Variety of riders: 72
Common pace: 33.708 km/h
1990 Ore Ida Girls’s Problem, Idaho, USA, the second longest ladies’s stage race ever held, after the 1984 Tour.
Variety of phases: 17
Longest stage: 129 km
General distance: 1007km
Variety of groups: 17
Variety of riders: 68
Common pace: 37.29 km/h
2022 Giro Donne
Variety of phases: 10
Longest stage: 126.1 km
General distance: 1019km
Variety of groups: 24
Variety of riders: 144
Common pace: 37.133 km/h
Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift 2022
Variety of phases: 8
Longest stage: 175km
General distance: 1032.7 km
Variety of groups: 24
Variety of riders: 144
Common pace: 38.382 km/h
Prize cash
Yr Lizzie Deignan (then Armitstead) obtained £2,000 for successful the world championship street race and Peter Sagan obtained £20,000 for the lads’s race: 2015
Prize cash for Lizzie Deignan’s Paris Roubaix victory 2021: €1,535
Proportion above minimal quantity mandated by the UCI: 0
Prize cash for Sonny Colbrelli’s Paris Roubaix victory 2021: €30,000
Proportion above minimal quantity mandated by the UCI: 33%
General prize purse for girls’s Amstel Gold race in 2021: €10,000
General prize purse for girls’s Amstel Gold race in 2022: €40,000 (bringing it in keeping with the lads’s race).
Prize cash for general Giro Donne winner Marianne Vos in 2014: €535
Prize cash for general Giro d’Italia winner Nairo Quintana in 2014: €200,000
General prize purse for the Giro Donne in 2022: €250,000
Prize cash for general winner Annemiek van Vleuten: €50,000
General prize purse for the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in 2022: €250,000
Prize cash for general winner: €50,000
General prize purse for the lads’s Tour de France 2022: €2.2 million
Prize cash for general winner: €500,000
General prize purse for the HP Girls’s Problem in 1998, the pre-eminent ladies’s stage race in America: $125,000 (the most important of all US races on the time, for each women and men)
Isabel Finest is the writer of ‘Queens of Ache: Legends and Rebels of Biking’, and has contributed to Cyclingnews with characteristic tales ‘Very important Statistics‘, ‘Can ladies race a three-week Grand Tour?‘, ‘Worldwide Girls’s Day: 7 exceptional ladies who made their mark on biking’s historical past‘, and Racing under the breadline: The ladies’s biking omertà.
Footnotes
1) From ‘The Economics of Skilled Street Biking’ by Daam Van Reeth, to be revealed by Springer in October 2022
2) Statistics calculated by Daam Van Reeth in his forthcoming guide ‘The Economics of Skilled Street Biking’, during which he additionally explains the complexities of calculating viewer figures, and the continuously deceptive knowledge offered by race organisers.
3) From ‘The Economics of Skilled Street Biking’ by Daam Van Reeth
4) ‘Girls’s Sport: Bouncing Again from the Pandemic?’ report revealed by Sky Sports activities and Leaders in Sport in 2021
5) Statistics compiled by www.sportlab-consulting.com and cited in Daam Van Reeth’s forthcoming guide ‘The Economics of Skilled Street Biking’.
