Emma Pooley says it's 'nuts' she gets more prize money from triathlon 'hobby' than pro cycling

@Bryin

Are you for real!

No one has a chance to watch women's pro cycling as the broadcast is limited to country's/Networks that will broadcast it.

Also when it comes to women pro riders, more often than not they are not paid on time or at all.

Time to stop treating women as third class people.

Best place i have found to keep me up to date with women's cycling

http://prowomenscycling.com/2014/09/10/two-updates-on-the-riders-treated...

Pro women cyclist go about as fast as a good cat 3 field. Look at the differences in distance and speed between women and men pros. I am all for equality in pay when there is equal work with equal performance. If women want equal pay as men then lets eliminate the different gender fields and have one race with one winner/payout.

Embrum (Man) is in the French Alps, not Switzerland.

Emma is one impressive all round athlete.

It's a shame that the ladies racing is not receiving the same coverage. Even at the recent classics, the ladies races were not receiving the same level of exposure (lacking live TV coverage!). The tour of Britain and tour series organisers seem very proactive in developing ladies racing in the UK, lets hope the racing continues to grow. It is very correct to expect standards of prize funds to match between male and female races. Triathlon doesn't have the history of cycle racing, yet it managed to get new races established and prize funds more balanced, so there is no reason to expect that ladies cycle races should take half a century before they can generate equal prize funds.

More exposure and balanced prize funds seems a fair and reasonable request and a good ideal to strive for.

Who let her out of the kitchen?

Ok, turning this on its head... does women's racing truly deserve the same funding as the men currently?

Is there the same coverage, is there the same races, are the sports stars in the same demand?

The answer is no. That's not being sexist, its just where things are right now. Do things need to change... hell yes, are things changing... absolutely.

As mentioned above, the sport has made huge leaps forward in the past few years, and those leaps forward are going to pay financial dividends very quickly.

Build the sport, and you will receive.

This is not sexism, this is economics, simple supply and demand.

Mens cycle sport and womens cyclesport are essentially different sports. Different calendars, different histories, different events... this isn't Tennis or Triathlon where the men and womens sports have essentially grown at the same time and rightly receive the same coverage and financial support. Womens cyclesport is playing catch up. Yes there are loads of lessons from the mens sport that can shorten the process, but its catching up none the less.

In my opinion its sexist to assume that womens cyclesport should simply side swipe 60 years of history and development and start earning the big bucks simply by sexual right.

The great news is that things will improve drastically, and I believe it will happen soon.

I keep banging on about this point as I don't believe the sexism argument is the right one... I am a pretty average man, and cycling fan... and every time I am made to feel my support of cycling is sexist makes me less inclined to support womens sport, not more.

Get on to the UCI, and get it on our televisions... I'll then watch it, jobs a good un.

A genuine question here, does the panel think cycling (in all its forms) would be as popular now without the efforts of sky ?
In my own humble opinion, I think back to when Mark Cavendish won sports personality of the year, I remember friends of mine (not into cycling) describing it as a bit of a "thin" year in terms of competition as the understanding of cycling and interest wasn't like it is now.
Along come team sky, with their slick branding, no doubt coincident with the Olympics, and hey presto, the profile of the sport is launched into the mainstream in the UK and a new hero is created (let's face it, getting a knighthood is a politician's populist reaction, in spite of his achievements).
My point is that I think it is possible to push profiles/generate interest but boy do you have to spend, plan and have a large element of luck. So yes change is possible but not without spending large amounts of money and a very slick marketing campaign.

Ironperson, surely.

Hm this is complex...
first sport in general is dominated by men and male fans and though this is changing the change is slow.
second programming for sport is controlled by men so sadly is the media and advertising.
even industries which are dominated by ladies such as fashion still have a disproportionate number of senior execs who are men who earn more than female counterparts.

So what we need here is a better understanding of both sport from a female perspective.
A female dominated audience for the telly coverage with product placement and therefore advertising budget and prize money ...im surprised that more clothing companies etc haven't worked this out how about a Marks and Spencers team

As to the eye candy issue i guess it depends on what sex you are and yes im both a male cyclist and straight and yes I work in the fashion industry...worth more than the total exports for arms or oil to the UK so theres plenty of cash there folks.
...
Lets just shelve those tired old prejudices please

this is quite simply a marketing issue, if the sports channels cover womans sport it would have more fans, which brings in more money, look at the percentage of coverage which is male compared to female its probably 90/10. I think there is an issue of males wanting to watch males and females also wanting to watch males but if you look at other countries USA especially they have laws on participation and coverage which drive the value of female sports up, were starting to get there in this country but probably 20years behind them.

There seems to be a strong current here of "Yes, the world is sexist, but that's just how it is, pointless trying to change it". To which I say: Um, no, that's rather the point here. Lets cause change.

How many pubs do you know of that would tolerate cycling like that though? The TdF maybe, but most pubs will more than likely be full of football or darts fans who probably aren't too keen on the image of cycling. The LMNH example was purely because it's more likely than walking into the Bow Bells on a Sunday afternoon to see Cancellara shaking his purt behind up the Paterberg.

Sponsors get more money/value on investment for more views, which is why television is subsidised by advertising, surely that's more important?

You'd usually see unrelated sponsors making big investments in a sport, rather than sports being shown in unlikely places - i.e. how many cyclists are now aware of the Christina watches brand because of their new team? that's a whole new market.

I'm guessing the reference to cost effectiveness is the advertisers costs for reaching their target audience. A term that gets used a lot is CPM, which is the real cost of getting their brand/message to one thousand people.

Cycling offers brilliant CPM by the way, however rband alignment is not too hot.

This argument drives me nuts...

I totally get why Emma and women are moaning, I totally appreciate that the top riders should be earning more... they should be. Its the same argument that has me moaning that if I was a footballer not a cyclist, at the level I compete, I'd be earning a six figure salary, not working in an office...

But that's the reality... as a sport, cycling generally doesn't do enough to attract the big money, and here we are, scrabbling around for the scraps.

Womens cycling is not where it needs to be to generate the income needed to pay its stars the cash they deserve. Its as simple as that. Its not sexist, its not men raging against the women, its just the way it is.

As I've commented on before, womens cycling has great potential because it is 30 years behind the mens game. Its great that you can pick your winner from a handful of starters... you can then have heroes and turn up with a chance to support them achieving something. There are only a handful of mens racing where that is still possible, and guess what, they are the most popular.

So... the sport has to do something to address this. And to me, that something is not simply moaning about sexual inequality. No one owes womens cycling anything, like any professional sport, it has to prove itself popular enough to earn the corporate dollar to pay its wages.

There are hundreds of sports out there that are essentially amateur for this very reason... why should women's cycle sport have any automatic right to be different?

Yes the UCI should be doing more, and I think its great that Emma is lobbying for more action, but please don't let sexism draw the argument and focus away from where it needs to be.

Play a womens' triathlon on the big screen in any pub, and watch carefully to see which shots have the clientelle chatting over their beer, and which shots have the viewers so fixated that conversation is momentarily suspended. Rightly or wrongly, it is this audience "reaction" that advertisers are searching for.

It's not "nuts", it's just advertisers looking for the most cost effective platform, and it is their money after all.

I honestly didn't expect you to start naming names hence the comment about being a tad more professional, but as you have since suggested, you're not actually connected with pro cycling. I'm now intrigued why someone not "in the profession" decided to stick their oar in.

The story takes a bit of a twist with that reveal, as it appears that someone with no connection to the event has mithered people they don't know to email them so they could "sort out" a problem they had no involvement in after reading about it in a magazine.

Whilst I appreciate you may feel hard done by due to wasting your time, I can safely say that if a complete stranger started asking me to get in touch with them so they could get involved in something that didn't actually concern them after reading something about me in a magazine I would be very, very wary of revealing anything to them.

Some good comments coming through, finally! Though I just want to clear a couple of slight misconceptions up;

1. While in CX it's a little different as the fields are smaller and generally more "open" - in road racing the competition is generally huge, with every high profile race usually being oversubscribe with the worlds best fighting to take part.

There are a lot more women's pro races than the UCI likes to let on, for every singular world cup race (of which there aren't many) - there are UCI ranked races going on constantly between each. And when there aren't there are fields of 200+ pro and pro-am women turning up to continental races and kermesses around the likes of Belgium and Holland. So there really isn't an issue of there not being enough on, there's loads! Unfortunately in Britain we aren't really exposed to that fact, though, so I can see where folk are coming from with that.

Even with domestic races, I have to sign up 3+ months in advance for a lot of them because even at club level almost every race is oversubscribed. A lot of them now running at similar distances to the men.

On the subject of distance, some see it as a good thing that a lot of women's races run at almost half the distance as the mens - this makes for an extremely exciting, attacking and fast race and is not to be sniffed at!

2. I think the issue is not that not enough people are willing to watch the women's sport, but there is little or no cooperation from the likes of the UCI to help. The UCI has a channel which it features extremely small snippets of world cup races, but there is no vested interest in providing the masses with a suitable base for media coverage. The likes of RAI sport in Italy *always* show full women's races that happen there and the return has been massive, they usually see almost equal numbers of viewings and in some cases even more than the men's - because there are viewers from across Europe as Italian TV is about the only reasonable coverage we get.

Granted it's been the case in the past that perhaps there wasn't a projected return due to the fact that it's not been as popular, but that simply isn't the case any more. Even if it were as simple as strapping a go pro to an outrider - thousands, if not millions, of people would view it if only to watch some quality racing - all you need to do is watch twitter during a big race and you'll see that the interest is there. There is just no drive from the UCI, or otherwise (ahem, BC) to make any sort of changes.

A lot of early season women's races happen around the same time as the men's, or at least a couple of days earlier. The infrastructure is there already, yet they just don't bother. It's simply a mixture of laziness and the old fashioned view that women's cycling is second rate to men's.

But as some have mentioned, the more people that take the time to actually watch the races, and give it a chance, the better. We can all be a part of making this better if we simply gave the sport an equal chance as fans.

The trouble is that the circle needs to be broken. Not competitive enough = not enough riders coming through from a young age. Why is this - what's the inspiration? "One day you might be world champion and win £1000 for winning one of the biggest races in the world" isn't going to get any girl out of bed early and on a bike to do the training required. What is there for young female riders to dream about?

Race distance isn't decided by the riders but by the organisers. Number of races is not decided by the riders either, neither is how much coverage these will get.

Cycling is weird - there's a lot of money in the sport but with very little reward for the competitors.

"I disagree with her, so she must be whingy."

Or perhaps not. Given her talents (triathlete, marathon runner etc), it's clear she could make more money in other sports if she dedicated herself to them, so, errr, maybe it's not the money that keeps her racing? She's campaigning for equality, and rightly so. Ok, I do understand the commercial realities, but these women barely get a sandwich and petrol money home for attending very high profile races.

Oh, and I've decided that rather than spend a small fortune on going to Ireland for the Giro, I'm saving some cash and taking the family to Welwyn Garden City that same weekend to watch the womens Tour Series.

Consternation about the fact that women get paid less than men in cycling (and in many other sports) is a bit like being upset about climate change or wishing for world peace. In other words, almost entirely pointless.

I am happy for women to be paid as much as men. But I don't write the cheques. The teams - and by extension, the sponsors - do. The reality is that not enough people watch women's cycling, whether live or on TV with the result that sponsors aren't all that interested (i.e., they don't pay much for the limited exposure to potential consumers that they get).

The UCI can go some way to fixing this - creating a dedicated internet channel that shows women's racing. Requiring race organisers to put on women's events contemporaneously with the men's events and offer a prize purse that is either equal with or some significant, mandated proportion of the men's purse. (Although given the past decade has seen men's races across Europe fold because of financial difficulties, this second proposal is unlikely to be popular among organisers or the men, who will - not unjustificably - conclude that their smaller prize pot is a result of paying more to women. Let's see how many of the pro peleton are feminists then. Against this, the prize pot for men's races is pretty small anyway, most of the athletes reward comes in enhanced contracts terms, so maybe reducting men's pot wouldn't matter all that much.) Requiring teams that want Pro Tour (do we still have that?) certification to have a fully funded and functioning women's team. (Again, suspect financial strain on smaller teams would prove unbearable.) All of these "fixes" have a cost and they don't solve the fundamental problem that not enough people appear to find women's bike racing particularly interesting.

You all can do something to - turn up to women's cycling events, read reports of women's races, do more stuff to show sponsor's you are interested.

I've watched a little bit of women's road racing. I will usually watch the worlds and maybe the olympics, and I've been to see UCI cross events on a couple of occasions (women usually precede men). So what follows is based on anecdote not any systematic study. Women's fields are less competitive than the men's field. You have a dozen or so truly talented individuals and a lot of others who appear to be simply "making up the numbers". I am not suggesting that I am faster/stronger/quicker than any of the women who race in UCI events. (This is, in any event, irrelevant. There are plenty of male cyclists who are faster/stronger/quicker than me who go past me every weekend and I don't chase them down and stuff cash in their jersey pockets.) It's just that a lack of competition produces a poor competition. It's the same problem as women's slopestyle in the Winter Olympics or women teeing off from a different place in golf. (And cyclocross. Marianne Vos is a phenomenal talent and Katie Compton rocks. But watching a women's UCI cross event you sometimes feel like its a girls' school sports day once you get past the top 5. I'd be interested to see what would happen if you put Matthieu Van der Poel, Michael Vantourenhout or Wout Van Aert on the start line for women's worold cup event.) It's not a lack of ability, it's a lack of competition at junior ranks. So maybe that's where it needs to be fixed, but that isn't going to reduce the pay differential overnight and so isn't likely to assuage those who want a quick fix.

In response to a couple of (stupid) points made above by a number of different posters:

* I don't care what women wear in sport, in particular I don't think its the job of an organising body to legislate that women should wear any particular attire - I'm looking at you FIVB. (This is a pretty sterile debate in cycling anyway, its hard to imagine that you can get much more revealing than a skinsuit.) Money talks - athletes either do what they need to do maximise their own earning potential (Maria Sharapova, anyone) or decide they don't want to play that game and accept their lot. (Giorgia Bronzini is one of the most successful cyclists of her generation but compare her with Rochelle Gilmour and tell me who gets more airtime without a helmet on.)

* The idea that women cyclists "do the same job" as male pros is simply incorrect. The women race for much shorter distances. They compete much less frequently.

Cycling in the UK (and in a number of other English speaking countries) is enjoying massive growth. If the UCI can't translate some of this into an increased profile for women's cycling then it's a more cack handed organisation than we imagined possible.

I can't figure out which is more repugnant. Joe In Poole's post or the fact that there are eight other cavemorons that felt compelled to hit the 'like' button.

Give your heads a wobble.

MadonePro - You may be correct but unless you are going to spill the full facts it is worthless. And if you can't provide the full details due to the nature of your work I would then suggest you refrain from being so unprofessional.