ED'S LETTER

As a teenager in 1985, I stayed up until the early hours on a Sunday night to watch the final of the World Snooker Championships. It was a blinder: Steve Davis (he of the ‘Interesting’ Spitting Image puppet) had cruised to an 8-0 lead with his blend of precision and unbreakable focus. But Dennis Taylor (he of the upside down glasses) fought back to clinch an 18-17 victory after a final frame that lasted over an hour. Apparently, I was just one of 18.5 million TV viewers in the UK who lost sleep in order to witness the Northern Irishman sink that last black and break Davis’s dominance. Why were there so many of us? It’s not like we were a nation of fanatical snooker players (I certainly wasn’t) and the sport itself was about as fast-moving and dynamic as watching glaciers melt. No, the reason was simple: it was on the telly.

Back in the 70s, TV executives realised they could fill hours of air time cheaply by sticking a camera at the end of a snooker table and going off for a long lunch. People started watching, they became hooked on the drawn-out drama, and eventually the top snooker players became household names, as big as any footballer.

And this, in my meandering way, brings me to the subject of women’s cycling. At the moment the sport is caught in a vicious circle: sponsors won’t support teams because they don’t get enough air time and TV companies won’t air enough of the races because they feel there isn’t a big enough audience. But snooker disproves this theory. If you put it on the telly, the audience will come.

As such, pressure needs to come from all sides – the UCI, the race organisers and the teams – to ensure that women’s racing gets its fair share of TV time. Then the fans will come. After all, cycle racing is a damned sight more exciting than snooker.