Oh yeah
(midwest.social)
LadyButterfly she/her
WomensStuffIf a man goes slow and falls to womens side do they give him a car ride or stop all the women? Like what's the standard protocol there.
Just like women aren’t allowed to draft behind men, men aren’t allowed to draft women. So if he wanted to stay in the race, he’d just have to try to stay to the side of any passing female riders. Though in practice if he’s that far back, he’ll probably either drop or be pulled from the race.
The race organizers really fucked that one up. But women catching the back of the men’s peloton is a “problem” that happens from time to time, and it can be hard to tell when it’s incidental or intentional strategy. It has been a tactic for some women to push extra hard at the start to try and catch the men’s field to draft behind them until the finish, which is an unfair advantage. Which is explicitly illegal in most racing series.
Though that gets complicated when it’s a woman catching a large men’s peloton that the female rider can’t ride alongside, and would have to just ride awkwardly far behind the pack to avoid running afoul of the rules.
I don’t know the details of this race in particular, but it seems the organizers halted the race to avoid this once they realized they really should have started the women’s race later. Was she intentionally trying to catch the men’s group? Maybe. Starting a breakaway from 2km in is almost certainly unsustainable, so if she wasn’t planning on catching the men’s field, it was either gross overconfidence or terrible strategy. She was very likely going to get caught by the women’s peloton regardless, and passed since they’ll be on fresher legs when they do catch her.
Edit: I should add that stopping the race for a few minutes with a neutralized restart is not entirely uncommon in pro cycling. For example, if part of the field has to stop and wait for a passing train, they’ll stop the front of the race as well, and restart them with the approximate gaps between groups they had before the train.
Wow, thanks for the insight! In this clickbait world, it's nice to get other perspectives.
I'm fairly sure in this race in particular the men were going slow enough for me to keep up, so yeah, they shouldn't have held her back as many other women would've eventually done so too.
They paused the entire women's race, so it wasn't like it was just her who got "punished". They probably should have noticed the gap was decreasing way sooner and intervened before it got so bad that a headline like this can come out.
Without all the details this seems really bad. Even with more details than the headline it seems awful that she had to stop and then ended up losing the race by a lot. It almost seems like she stopped while the race continued behind her. But with all the details, it seems like she may have lost the race due to her strategy. She was pushing way too hard early on and the women who paced themselves better ended up passing her later in the race.
While I'm sure there's a lot more nuance to this picture, I'm not going to split hairs over a metaphor I'm sure we're all intimately familiar with.
Reminds me of the many bosses I've had who expected me to be nicer to butthurt male employees when they weren't used to having a woman supervisor. "Think about how hard it is for t h e m."
The article. The snapshot is fairly accurate. She was catching up to the mens' race support vehicles, they stopped her for five minutes. She lost her momentum and her groove, ended up finishing in 74th place.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/04/sport/cycling-women-belgium-intl-scli-spt/
And this article says perhaps the entire women's race field was paused, not just the one cyclist in the lead. But anyone who's ever done any sort of distance sport event, you know stopping for 5 minutes can absolutely destroy your performance. A mental and physical disruption.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nicole-hanselmann-omloop-het-nieuwsblad-2019-cycling-race-men-belgium/
The articles mention that the race organizers were considering starting the women’s race a few more minutes behind the men’s to mitigate this issue. Does anyone know if they stuck with that or did 2020 disrupt enough that this was forgotten about?
Why is bike racing segregated by gender?
So that a woman can win a race.
There are physiological differences between the sexes.
My understanding is that one of the areas women excel at over men is stamina, so I was thinking that with bike racing the difference in muscle mass would be offset.
I was curious about this, so I figured I'd just compare the 2024 Summer Olympics men and women's races. Well, bad news upfront, the men's race was 273km long, and the women's race was only 157km long. Not a great sign out of the gate, but maybe that's for dumb reasons.
The man who won gold finished 273km in 6 hours and 19 minutes, and the woman who won gold finished 157km in 3 hours and 59 minutes. A little tricky to compare....
So I figured I'd compare average speed across the whole race. Obviously this isn't an ideal metric, because presumably a racer could go faster if they were racing a shorter distance, and so the women with the shorter race should be able to go faster than if they had to save more energy for a longer one. But I figure despite that, it would be at least the start of a comparison.
So the man who won gold had an average pace of 43.22 kmph over nearly 6.5h, and the woman who won gold had an average pace of 39.41 kmph over about 4 hours. So 43 kmph and 39 kmph aren't that far off, but again over 6 hours that 4 kmph difference equates to 24 km of difference, and feels like a pretty big difference. And again, this is with the woman having the advantage of a shorter race.
Okay, not looking great. But that's gold to gold. If we make some leaps and assume that the woman could sustain that same pace for the duration of the male race, or that the men's race ended early but somehow they had the same average pace anyway, where would a woman with that pace rank in the rankings, if not gold?
Well, I can't be sure, because at 77th place Charles Kagimu of Uganda went 273km in 6 hours and 50 minutes, which is 39.95 kmph, still faster than her 39.41. Everyone slower than 77th place seems to have gotten a Did Not Finish and thus no time was recorded.
So despite the fact that the women's race is substantially shorter than the men's, the gold medalist for the women's race was slower than 77th place in average pace during her shorter race, and may not have even finished the race due to being too slow. So I don't think it worked out.
Results I'm comparing: Men's Race Women's Race
On one hand, this is true. But professional bike races aren't long enough for that to equalize the results.
And societal factors are at play too, leading to more men than women pursuing professional sports in the first place.
More participants always mean better top results.
women tolerate doping drugs worse?
https://time.com/5544228/female-cyclist-forced-to-stop-men/
She said their race was halted for “five or seven minutes.” While she was given a head start to regain her lead when the race began again, Hanselmann told Cyclingnews that she lost her momentum when the race came to an abrupt stop, and her competitors soon gained ground. She ultimately finished in 74th place.
