Don’t scream sexism over cycling blunder

A WOMen’S cycling race was temporarily halted on Sunday because the leader caught up with a men’s group. At the Omloop Het nieuwsblad event in Belgium, Swiss racer nicole Hanselmann set off at such a lick that she was close to encroaching on the male race that had started 10 minutes earlier. How unfair, you think. Or, who is this extraordinary woman competing with men in such a physically testing sport? All a red herring, of course. This isn’t about sexist organisers but logistical error. The women’s race was halted — a real shame, but unavoidable — because if the two groups had begun to merge, it could have been chaos. As for Hanselmann, she eventually finished 74th in the women’s event, so wasn’t going to be troubling the men much longer. These are very different races, after all. The women’s course is 123km, the men’s 200km. The reason there is a gap between the starts is that the riders have different challenges, different moments to attack, different sprints and climbs. The races are kept separate just as the 1500metres in athletics does not start while the 5,000 metres is on the track. Both distance events, but incompatible. So, somewhere, the organisers messed up. They underestimated what might happen if a female rider set an extraordinary pace. Hanselmann broke after seven kilometres and established a two-minute lead at the front of her group, closing in on the support vehicles in the men’s race. no doubt the last of the male cyclists were slower than expected, too. Yet over the course of the day, the numbers reverted to the norm. The fastest woman, chantal Blaak, covered 123km at roughly 98 seconds per kilometre, the slowest male time was just over 90 seconds per kilometre across 200km. The delay was unfortunate, but it was not motivated by sexism, or an absence of support for women’s cycling. They just got it wrong.