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.
This article is clickbaity, making the situation sound like misogyny to the uninformed, but I wasn’t aware of the profound effect of slipstreaming in cycling, so TIL.
Misandrist society as always
Hi nimrod and welcome to WomensStuff! We’re a trans inclusive women only forum and ask cis men don’t comment. Please check out the rules ❤️
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Let me flip that around.
Why do men (and let’s be honest here, almost always specifically white men) simply have to comment where:
- They have no meaningful lived experience outside of “I think i saw a woman in porn once”.
- The people who are talking don’t want to be constantly correcting and educating the ignorant.
- The group in question is a single fucking group out of literally THOUSANDS OF GROUPS where they are unwelcome?
Doesn’t that just make you cringe a little, being so fucking whiny and so fucking self-centred that you can’t stand a single fucking space that doesn’t want you?
Note: these questions are for you to ponder, not reply, because:
- Answering it is against the rules. Don’t be the kind of whiny shit that breaks the rules because your ego got bruised.
- I won’t see the answer because nothing is more of a turn-off for conversational purposes than a whiny manosphere twit. You’re getting blocked the moment I hit “Reply”.
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Wow, thanks for the insight! In this clickbait world, it’s nice to get other perspectives.
Taken from common wisdom, but doesn’t mean it’s always true. Maddy’s recent record setting is a prime example:
Yeah it’s a little different for ultras. Drafting isn’t allowed, so they play out very differently from road races, they tend to spread out. But absolutely incredible result from Maddy!
Good point on the draft requirements, I’m more commonly watching women’s gravel or MTB. So people like Maddy and Syd who commonly push past large contingents of the men’s groups.
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.
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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?
I hope so.
Wouldn’t it be good to rest after pushing so hard at the start of the race? That could actually create an advantage compared to people who didn’t need a rest because they were pacing themselves more. I don’t race though so idk
Imagine your whole body wants you to stop. It physically hurts. The pain is how your body is telling you to stop. You manage to somehow compel yourself to keep going.
Then you stop. Your body gets what it wants. And the pain hits and immobilizes you. No more rhythm to distract you.
Immediately the inertia is gone. You just wanna stop, know you can’t. Every moment of that waiting and knowing you have to continue is torment.
To be stopped when in such a good groove is going to be even more demoralizing.
Yeah that 5 mins was a nightmare.
oof
Why are these gendered? How stupid.
Let them all start at once, at one event.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not generally that women are banned from men’s sports.
It’s men that are banned from women’s sports.
That’s what the “Open” in many sporting events means. Anyone who passes preliminaries is free to attend.
That usually doesn’t work. It will give unfair advantages to women who manage to “catch the wheel” of a male cyclist and especially the ones who manage to hang behind an entire group of men.
It takes much less effort to closely follow a cyclist and even much less effort than that to hang at the back of the peloton than to ride by yourself.
Now of course you can make rules about female cyclists not being allowed to get closer than X amount of distance behind a male cyclist, but that is just much more complicated than simply separating the groups.
It is also the reason why they banned male pacemakers running in front of the top female marathon runners. It is unfair to the rest of the group who have to do the running on their own.
Ironman triathlons are a great example of a race where “drafting” is forbidden. Men and women compete on the same course at the same time, but every athlete must maintain a specific distance from others to ensure they are not gaining an unfair advantage by riding in another person’s slipstream.
https://www.ironman.com/news/ironman-releases-2026-ironman-global-competition-rules
Regular triathlons as well. But the rules are different there than in regular cycling.
Yeah that’s bullshit. Because the same thing happens in male-only races. Some people hang on to the peleton. That’s racing strategy.
No, it’s absolutely no bullshit. Normally you can either stay in the peleton and conserve your energy or you try your luck and break away but give up drafting. You can’t draft behind something that’s not part of the same race. For a female breakaway cyclist to use the draft of a male peleton is essentially like drafting behind a team car. That’s not some clever strategy, that’s cheating
Not if you think about this a little more than 2 seconds….
But sure, I will explain some more.
In a combined race, even the fastest women have something to draft behind that rides faster than they normally could: a man. That gives them an unfair advantage over the other riders who don’t have that same advantage.
The only thing faster than the fastest men is a motorised vehicle. And drafting behind that is also illegal.
Or simply put: the reason a woman can’t draft behind a man is the same reason a man can’t draft behind a motorcycle.
In a combined race, even the fastest women have something to draft behind that rides faster than they normally could: a man.
Ok, but every single race has people drafting behind others that are faster than them, right? Why is it a-ok for a slow man to draft behind a fast man, but it’s cheating for a woman to draft behind a man?
Only the second person can draft, not the first. In this case the first person drafted, I think that’s what this is about right?
Edit: oh shit I’m not a woman, so I am not allowed to participate
Ok I feel like that’s a fair distinction, and in this case, makes it clear where the blame should be pointed: the race organizers. If it’s the case that the person in the first position isn’t allowed to draft, the race organizers should set the start times to where that isn’t a possibility.
Yes. Behind another human cyclist. Not behind motorcycles or anything other that is faster than human capabilities.
the fastest women have something to draft behind that rides faster than they normally could: a man
The fastest women are always going to be behind a man? The slowest man is always going to be in front of the fastest woman? I don’t know shit about competitive cycling, but I’d love to see some stats to support that claim.
Why would they pick the slowest man to draft behind?
No they would draft behind any man that is faster than them, but not too fast so that they will not be dropped.
why cant I be faster than a man on a bike?
youre saying I could never win a single race against any man?
Uhhh… what?
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Wait til you learn why there’s no major women’s baseball…
Why? I don’t follow baseball, but I’m curious.
The government is hiding the fact that women exist
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.”
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Well that’s a horrible mindset. By the way, do you know the rules here?
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.
If 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.
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
Great analysis! I think it overall shows there is a big difference between male and female cyclists. That said, I think it’s a bit unfair against the women’s race winner. Cycling the fastest is way harder than the slowest: if she were to attempt to join the men’s race, she would have a faster peloton to join and ride the race out. Also she would have to lead the peloton way less, and didn’t need to break off it and have to win other flights which are all draining. That said, this wouldn’t be the strategy to get gold, but at least I expect her to not get a DNF.
You can also look up last year’s Unbound 200 mile and compare the Elite men VS Elite women results. It’s the same course but they start with offset times. The top men finish about 1.5 hours faster than the women. But the fastest women definitely finish faster than some of the men and overtake them during the race.
That said, I’ve also listened to interviews with the female cyclists who prefer the separate start. I believe this race series used to be combined genders. What they prefer is that they can actually start the race knowing their rivals and setting pace accordingly. In a larger group for an endurance race, it’s possible to misjudge your opponents and burn out faster than you’d like or chase the wrong targets. The women’s field gives everyone a better idea of how to set pace since there is a natural separation throughout the course.
Even if women have better stamina, the power output is not the same which results in a different pace on average.
Ah, true, all fair points! It really is pretty apples to oranges comparing different lengths and averages and making up what might have happened.
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?
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