Female winner of bike race tears down barriers
Carrasco deserves attention for winning on the world stage, writes David Booth.
For someone old, white and male, gender politics can be a black hole. Wading into any conversation regarding the accomplishments, ambitions or tribulations facing our female partners is to risk accusations of contempt, condescension or, worse yet, mansplaining.
Intention doesn’t always matter in these politically-charged times, and accolades are often as penalized as criticism. The best thing is simply to avoid any subject not gender neutral.
But something big happened this weekend in the world of motorsports. History was made, and just because the protagonist was female seems no reason for me not to mark this milestone.
A young woman from Murcia, Spain, Ana Carrasco, won Sunday’s World Supersport 300 race in Portimao, Portugal. As far as anyone can remember, it’s the first time a woman has won a major motorcycling world championship road race. Oh, some anorak will no doubt cite some long obscured trivia from the Roaring ’20s, but in modern motorcycle racing, Carrasco is the first woman to score even a single point in a MotoGP or World Superbike series since 2001, so she deserves as many plaudits as we can give her.
And what a race. Portimao is a big, bad track, all massive elevation changes and impossibly fast corners that frighten the hell out of pretty much anyone not having the chutzpah to race full throttle into high-speed blind apexes without fear or trepidation.
Carrasco gave as good as she got. At one point, she was part of a five-riders-abreast melee into Turn 1 and her elbows were as high as anyone’s. And as the person standing on the top rung of the “box,” she not only outhustled and outmuscled all the young men desperately trying to squeeze her out of contention, she also out-thought them: Her winning move was a brilliantly timed draft pass less than 50 metres from the finish line.
One could try to diminish this talk of singular achievement by noting the WSS300 series is the undercard of the WSBK calendar, the 40 or so horsepower Carrasco’s Kawasaki Ninja 300 boasts but a fraction of the similarly Team Greened Ninja 1000 Jonathan Rea rode to victory in the main event.
However, in trying to diminish Carrasco’s achievement, you’d also be denigrating the talent of all the other racers from which the future champions of motorcycling are sure to emerge. Every leader in MotoGP — from 38-year-old Valentino Rossi to Spanish sensation Marc Marquez — got their starts in just such lower echelons of formula racing.
Indeed, other than her gender, Carrasco’s resume reads no different than those of the other competitors in World Supersport. She started riding motorcycles when she was three, took up racing shortly thereafter and has been hovering around the top-flight of racing since she was 16. Nor has she received special treatment. Her time in Moto3, another feeder series, was spent trying to be competitive on hand-me-down KTMs.
“Last year, I wasn’t able to do the last four races because I had no money,” she told Crash.net in 2015. “(Sponsorship) is really difficult, the same as anyone else.”
The difference, of course, is that by the skin of her chinnychin-chin — 0.053 seconds to be exact — she became the first of her gender to win a motorcycle race on the world stage.
And Carrasco’s triumph couldn’t come at a better time. Now that Danica Patrick looks set to retire from active (or, at least serious) competition, there’s a dearth of female role models in the racing world.
As for the last bugaboo the rampantly sexist always trot out to justify the exclusion of women from all manner of motorsports — size and strength — know that, a) motorcycle racing is one of the most physically demanding of motorsports and b) of the top five that battled for the lead, Carrasco appeared to be the most physically prepared for the stress. Besides, size and strength haven’t prevented Dani Pedrosa — whom Carrasco would tower over — from being among the most feared of MotoGP racers.
History has been made, a milestone achieved and, let’s pray, a precedent set.
Let’s hope that, sooner rather than later, the rostrum Carrasco — or someone very much like her — stands atop will be even taller.