Emakumeen Nafarroako Women’s Elite Classics
Women’s Cycling Weekly: Issue 25
All the news in the world of women's cycling this week.
All the news in the world of women's cycling this week.
Hello! Welcome to Women’s Cycling Weekly issue 25🚴♀️
Watching the Giro this week got me thinking about how brilliant it would be to have a women’s race on this scale. Wall-to-wall daily coverage (unless it rains) and extensive insights and analysis into the minutiae of the racing (just HOW many podcasts are there?!) all played out in front of stunning scenery — having so much excess coverage that you can afford to cut away to castles and other monuments is male privilege.
Part of the background celebrations for the race included the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death and so the parallels between grand tour racing and his epic poetry were duly drawn. The closest the women’s peloton has to a grand tour — the Giro Rosa — isn’t even broadcast and so the daily vignettes of divine comedy go largely unseen. The disconnect that this causes fuels the narrative that nobody is interested in women’s racing because, without an audience, the protagonists are invisible and so too is the drama (if a tree falls in the woods etc.).
Which brings me onto the news from this week about the impending 2022 women’s Tour de France which caused plenty of excitement. If the race does justice to the world-class riders who turn up on the startline then it will be a huge turning point, but I’ll leave the unbridled optimism to everyone else and reserve the right to uphold my cynicism when it comes to ASO right up until I’m stood watching the grand depart. Also, a moment of pause for the fact that we will never see Anna van der Breggen race a women’s Tour de France 💔.
I’m sure I’m not alone in thinking just how great it would be to sit down and immerse myself in three (ish) weeks worth of women’s racing as we do with men’s GTs. How I would love to be scrabbling to keep up with the myriad narratives woven throughout the race as riders take their own journeys through Inferno, Purgatorio, and (for the scant few) Paradiso (is it obvious that I’ve never studied Dante?)
To watch and enjoy racing without feeling constantly prickled by some sense of injustice is a rare privilege in women’s racing, but one which I think we all hope might become the norm in the future. Just leave out 200km snore-fest stages, yeah?
On the subject of the women’s Tour de France:
Elsewhere:
Just in case anyone needed a reminder as to how emancipating bikes can be.
The latest episode of Matt Stephens unplugged features a great chat with yesterday’s third-place and all-round likeable character Elisa Longo Borghini.
Saddle sores are an issue taking up a considerable chunk of my thoughts at the moment. My body (or rather my chamois/saddle) decided that a piece I’m working on about women’s saddles should become an immersive experience and I am suffering (for the very first time despite over 6 years of riding including racing) from a proper saddle sore. TMI? IDC. Because this is a real issue and the taboo that surrounds it is part of the problem.
If I haven’t already made it clear, my stance in this newsletter is that I am not an expert who has everything covered all of the time — in other words: I’ll probably get stuff wrong/miss things and that’s ok. On this particular matter, however, I was kicking myself that I found out about this very exciting piece of bib short innovation through Caroline Criado Perez’s (brilliant) Invisible Women newsletter before I found out about it myself. But then I thought: hang on, why isn’t the cycling world shouting about this from the rooftops? Oh yeah, because it’s for women.
Anyway, well bloody done to Endura for being, not the first, but one of very few brands to actually develop products for female cyclists using actual real-life women instead of simply guessing what women might require. For further reading on the topic see: Hannah Dines for The Guardian, and if you haven’t read the Rouleur women’s issue (why not?) then you can listen to a piece from it by the brilliant Orla Chennaoui on this issue here.
A slightly shorter edition this week but I hope you enjoyed it nevertheless!
If you like what you see you can support WCW on Ko-Fi. And a huge thanks to everyone who has done so already!
Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!
Until next time,
Amy x