Yesterday morning, I saw something unexpected in my social media feed: high-quality, live coverage of women racing bikes. The whole course was covered by cameras, with a man and woman commentating on the action as it unfolded. I was hypnotized. You see, I've been frustrated with the lack of parity in coverage for women’s bike racing, especially with regards to live coverage of major events this season. So seeing this particular race unfold, immediately followed by a men’s race of the same distance, was nothing short of surreal. It was almost as though someone had pitched everything we know about current bike racing out the window, approached the sport from scratch, and created a bike race for the current era—eschewing all the toxicity and misogyny masquerading as "tradition" in cycling.



Because that’s exactly what happened at the CrossFit Games.

This is the second year in a row that the CrossFit Games has brought cycling into the fold through mass-start bike racing events. Last year it was cyclocross. This year, the Games started off with a ten lap crit, with forty riders on the course at once. There were equal distances for both fields with equal coverage, equal pay-outs, and both races packaged together and marketed as two parts of a single, world-class event.

From the perspective of someone who is immersed within cycling, this format was shocking.

Compare it with what we just saw in our sport’s most widely covered and celebrated event, the Tour de France: weeks of men racing long courses, constant coverage of men’s racing and men’s gear, and mostly men commenting within the coverage of the event. Buried among all of this: a single unnecessarily shortened stage for pro women. This essentially reduced these elite athletes to a sideshow act.

From the perspective of people outside of cycling, this format is shocking. Even the coverage of the Giro Rosa, the biggest women's stage race on the calendar, was disappointing. There's only one way to watch it in the US—an abbreviated livestream showing the last 20K of each stage, broadcast in Italian.

Sports advertise themselves and set the tone for every level of participation with their highest level of competition. CrossFit is frankly nailing it. And it shows: The sport has grown from 14 gyms in 2005 to over 13,000 today, with more than 4 million members worldwide.

But cycling in comparison? Reflect on our most celebrated race and think about how that sets the tone for competition and recreation throughout, especially for athletes who don't compete in the men's field. Why would anyone want to take up a sport that clearly doesn’t value them? And what does it say about us and our industry that we uphold this exclusive messaging even as our sport stagnates?



Let’s take a page from CrossFit. We can’t afford not to.

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