Is the gender gap closing?
There is still a big divide between men’s and women’s pro racing in terms of teams, races and salaries, but things are starting to change, as Cyclist discovers
For every Jumbo-visma, which launched its women’s squad this year, there are several teams employing female riders in name only
When her professional racing licence arrived in the post at her Brittany home in January,
Audrey Cordon-ragot might have been forgiven for punching the air in triumph. The French road race champion, who rides for TrekSegafredo, had been making the case for years that she should be granted a professional licence, not an amateur one – a sentence that you might have to read twice.
Cordon-ragot is, after all, one of the most recognisable faces in the women’s peloton. She has been riding as a pro for almost a decade, initially for Hitec before moving to Wiggle High5 then switching to Trek-segafredo when the team was launched in 2019.
Only now, however, are licences denoting that the holder is actually a professional being issued by the French federation to women who ride for Women’s Worldteams, of whom there are 11 in France.
‘It’s a big step for cycling in France,’ Cordon-ragot says. ‘I had the feeling after we announced it that people had no clue that we weren’t regarded as professionals all along.
‘People were shocked, but it’s still the case in many countries. Not long ago it was the same in The Netherlands. I was talking about it with Ellen [van Dijk, her Trek teammate], and she told me the change only happened there three or four years ago.’
The move may sound like a symbolic gesture, but it’s more than that. There are practical implications, as CordonRagot explains. ‘It’s symbolic in a way because it doesn’t change anything for me. For many years now I regarded myself as a professional and I acted like a professional. But it wasn’t always easy in my personal life, because if you go to a bank in France and ask for a loan, if you are not a professional they look at you, like, “What are you doing, then?” You tell them and they ask, “So is cycling your work?” You try to explain but they don’t really understand. And that was a problem for me and for others.
‘I felt that not being regarded as professionals meant we were not taken seriously, and not considered, and this is the worst feeling you can have as a person in general.’
Cordon-ragot helped lead the campaign to rectify this. ‘I didn’t push for this as much for myself as for young French riders coming into cycling. It’s going to help them. It’s a big, big step.’
Ready for the big time
Other big steps for women’s cycling are coming, and in France in particular – to which many will say, ‘About time.’ The big one is the ‘women’s Tour de France’ (in quote marks because as yet it still doesn’t have an official title), originally planned for 2021 but pushed back a year because of the pandemic. Sources at ASO, the body that organises the Tour de France, Paris-roubaix and other major races, say it will be an eight-day race that will start in Paris on the final day of the men’s race.
But first is the delayed women’s Paris-roubaix, which fell victim to Covid-19 in the autumn. The debut women’s edition will now be held on 11th April, starting in Denain and finishing at the famous Roubaix Velodrome after 116km and 17 sectors (29.2km) of pavé.
‘I said many years ago that when there was a Paris-roubaix for women I would stop cycling,’ says CordonRagot with a laugh, because she has no intention of stopping and every intention of being on the start line this year. ‘I think we really needed this race – we also need some others, which are not yet on the schedule – but this is one we’ve all been looking for.
‘I would like to be on the start line and I think we will have the strongest team in the race with Lucinda Brand, Ellen van Dijk, Elisa Longo Borghini and Lizzie Deignan of course.’ (See p80 for more on Deignan’s preparation for Roubaix.)
It’s set to be the showpiece event in a women’s calendar that has suffered more Covid-related cancellations than the men’s. At the time of writing, three Women’s Worldtour events have been scrapped already this year, and the Women’s Tour in the UK, scheduled for June, has been postponed, with the organisers hoping for an October date.
Smaller races have fared even worse, which made for a delayed start to an uncertain season. Like Cordon-ragot and many others, however, British rider Lizzy Banks is looking forward to Paris-roubaix, having joined Team Ceratizit-wnt for 2021.
Banks, who won her second Giro Rosa stage last year and finished runner-up to Deignan at GP de PlouayBretagne, relishes tough roads and even tougher conditions so she’s hoping for a wet and windy Roubaix.
‘I would absolutely love that,’ she says. ‘For Paris-roubaix you need to be able to sustain power over a long time. You need grit, you need to not be fussed by really gnarly roads, to not be scared and to be prepared to fight. I’m pretty excited, but the cobbles will be completely new for me. I’ve not even ridden the Tour of Flanders before, but I’m looking forward to riding Flanders and Roubaix this year.’
Things are looking up
Banks doesn’t ride for a Women’s Worldteam, which means she wouldn’t qualify for a professional licence in France. But she has proved herself to be one of the world’s best riders and is in contention for a place on the British team for the Olympic Games in Tokyo.
When her Équipe Paule Ka team folded abruptly last October, preventing her from making her Flanders debut, it seemed a hammer blow for women’s cycling. And yet 12 out of her 13 former teammates were able to find new homes for 2021 – seven on Women’s Worldteams.
Partly that’s because the Women’s Worldtour has expanded from eight to nine teams. There are 117 riders in total across those teams in 2021, an increase of 10 on last year. There also appear to be greater opportunities beneath that, on paper at least, with 46 Continental teams offering places to 578 riders (up from 559 last year).
At Continental level, however, the range is vast. For every Ceratizit-wnt or Jumbo-visma (which launched its Marianne Vos-led women’s squad this year – see box below), there are several teams employing female riders in name only, with little or no salary.
Still, both Banks and Cordon-ragot feel that the picture is relatively bright.
The arrival of Jumbo-visma on the scene is a major boost. In addition, SD Worx has taken over title sponsorship from Boels-dolmans, the most consistently successful – and at times dominant – team of the past decade. They are a team in transition but are building for the future with World Champion Anna van der Breggen set to move into the sports director’s seat in the team car at the end of the season.
World number one Annemiek van Vleuten, meanwhile, has moved to Movistar, significantly strengthening a team that has largely underperformed since its launch in 2018. Overall there is now a more even distribution of talent among the top teams, which include Ceratizit-wnt, Jumbo-visma and Team Tibco-svb on top of the WWT outfits.
‘Last year Trek-segafredo were quite dominant and they could be again this year,’ says Banks. ‘But I think this year we are in a healthy place as a sport. There’s a wider spread of good riders across more teams than ever before.
‘More than that, the level has gone through the roof since the Covid break. People found another gear that they didn’t know they had and then went into winter training off the back of that. I think we’ll see racing at a really high level in 2021.’
To train or to race?
Banks’ claim that Covid could actually have helped with race conditioning is an intriguing one. One potential explanation, she suggests, is that the pandemic allowed riders to step off the treadmill of racing and travelling and focus fully on training.
‘The negative impact of travel on performance is really underestimated and underappreciated,’ Banks says. ‘A travel day isn’t a rest day. It’s exhausting, and in a normal season you have so many travel days. If you eliminate those as a source of fatigue and channel that energy into training and resting, the performance benefits are enormous.
‘That’s what happened in lockdown. Plus, there were no other distractions – no social life. OK, we didn’t have the intensity of racing, but consistency of training is more important. And when racing resumed everyone was really fresh and motivated.’
This doesn’t apply only to the women, of course, but it’s an approach that the best female rider in the world, Van Vleuten, has been adopting for
a few years – a period that has coincided with her greatest successes.
Banks points to Van Vleuten’s success when asked whether cycling might become – like athletics – more of a ‘training sport’ than a ‘competing sport’. Even if it was subtly changing before Covid, with (predominantly male) riders tending to spend ever more time at altitude training camps and doing fewer race days, it has traditionally been a sport where riders race to train rather than train to race.
‘For quite a few years now Annemiek has had a lighter racing calendar than others,’ Banks points out. ‘That has allowed her to race the races she wants to do well in, and at other times train.’
Very few riders have teams that would indulge them in this way, and it’s an irony that, despite the lessons of last year, the opportunity to prioritise training over racing may become even more distant for the top female riders – unless squad sizes dramatically increase.
Cordon-ragot makes this very point regarding the women’s Tour de France – or whatever it ends up being called – in 2022. She says she is often asked why there isn’t a three-week race for women, and answers that a shorter stage race is more practical and desirable.
With a new eight-day race, she says, and particularly one with such a high profile from day one, ‘There’s a big question about our programme and how we prepare for it. At the moment each Worldteam has 14, 15 riders maximum, and if we want to do the Giro Rosa, the World Championships, the Women’s Tour and the new women’s Tour de France, it’s a lot.
‘For our team, we will manage it. But for the smaller teams I think it’s going to be difficult.’
It goes back to Cordon-ragot’s argument about being recognised as a professional by her federation, and to the range in resources of the outfits that race at Continental level – often directly against far bigger teams.
‘Some of the teams have riders who are at university or working,’ she says. ‘To ride a big stage race you need a training camp before it, and to build a team for it.’
Tiptoeing towards equality
Cordon-ragot cautions that it could be counterproductive to take too many big steps too quickly. For a case study in the merits of looking to grow gradually but sustainably she need only point to her own team, Trek-segafredo, which has been consistently raising the bar for women’s teams since its inception.
When they started they appointed female sports directors, they integrated the women’s team with the men’s team as far as possible, and they use their male and female stars almost interchangeably on social media. They gave the women the same equipment as the men and the same backup and support. And this year they took another significant step, raising the minimum salaries of their female riders to match their male counterparts (a hike of €19,000, from €20,000 to €39,000).
‘I’ve found a good atmosphere at all my teams,’ says Cordon-ragot,
‘but here we’re surrounded by very professional staff and sponsors who are really, really into women’s cycling. They really trust us and they expect a lot from us. We have directors who are always asking for more and a manager who’s always hoping for more.’
She laughs at the ever-higher expectations that come with being in a team like Trek-segafredo. ‘I can tell you that the briefing we had at our training camp in January was quite clear. Our manager [Luca Guercilena] said, “You know, congratulations for having reached this level and for finishing first in the Worldtour, but I’m really hoping for a better season this year.”
‘I like that, because we’re not going to stay at the top if we don’t keep pushing. They look at us the same as the men; they treat us the same and they are putting the same pressure on. And
I think that is fair enough.’
Richard Moore is a cycling journalist and author, former racer and co-founder of The Cycling Podcast
‘We’re surrounded by staff and sponsors who are really, really into women’s cycling. They really trust us and they expect a lot from us’