When the cycling coach and father of three Warwick Phillips opened the front door of his house in Adelaide four years ago, a young woman he had coached some years before pulled out a knife and stabbed him several times. In custody, another prisoner poured boiling water over her in the showers, the culmination of a campaign of sustained bullying. Her crime? To avenge the repeated sexual abuse she had suffered from the age of 16 and for which Phillips had received a four-and-a-half-year suspended sentence the year before.

Was it the suspended sentence or the sight of her abuser riding out with the Southern Districts Veteran and Ladies Cycling Club in the face of a lifetime ban from Cycling South Africa and Cycling Australia that pushed her over the edge? She described the abuse as “like being stabbed”. Her victim-impact statement read: “He has ruined my entire life and the person that I was. Now all I want to do is die to release this pain forever. I have to be watched or I will kill myself.”

Meanwhile, in Melbourne, a cycling coach has been convicted of 13 counts of sexual offences against a teenager after sending her inappropriate messages on social media and massaging her in her underwear on the dining room table. Having become a trusted friend of the family, he would give her massages in their house, pulling down her underwear, rubbing her thighs and sexually penetrating her with his finger.

Bridie O’Donnell, the professional cyclist and doctor, confirms that Australia has more than its fair share of coaches entering into “consenting” relationships with their riders, some of legal age, some not. Of course this isn’t some curiously Antipodean problem.

Mark Elmy, a cycling coach and Games Maker at the London 2012 Olympics, was convicted in 2014 of stalking a woman he had coached and had a brief affair with. When she terminated their relationship, Elmy would not take no for an answer. There were anonymous cards, “casual” encounters and money stuffed in envelopes. He pled care and concern. The court disagreed, fined him £1,200 and made him the subject of a restraining order.

And these are the lucky ones whose experiences were taken seriously.

It’s the tip of a disturbing iceberg, where women riders are trapped in abusive situations by male coaches who exploit their power in a culture that marginalises the victim. In her autobiography Genevieve Jeanson, the double junior world champion who was doped throughout her career, taking EPO aged 16 – alleged that she endured physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her coach, André Aubut. He was finally given a life suspension for administering drugs to her last month. He denies the other forms of abuse.

Tammy Thomas, the former sprint track cyclist who provided evidence to CIRC, has spoken of sustained sexual abuse by her coaches, one of whom introduced her to doping. Thomas is currently seeking funding for her book The Resilient Cyclist which, she claims will expose “Olympic level sex abuse and doping in sports.”

Thomas was coached by Desmond Dickie. Dickie was discharged by the Canadian Cycling Association after a string of allegations about sexual misconduct with teenage girls, including sharing rooms with them at training camp and administering prescription drugs. He later sued successfully for wrongful dismissal and went on to become head sprint coach for the American track cycling team, before being hired as the national coach for the Trinidad and Tobago team. Dickie was given the job due to his proven ability to win medals, despite the warning from the Ontario Court Judge that “his conduct, as it stands, certainly calls into question his ethics and his right to remain as national cycling coach. Another forum may properly decide that he is in violation of the ethical standards expected.”

And now, among the headline-grabbing evidence of doping and corruption in the men’s sport, the CIRC report states “The Commission was told that women’s cycling had been poorly supported in past years, and was given examples where riders in the sport had been exploited financially and even allegedly sexually.”

The debate about a minimum wage for women cyclists has raged long and hard. Tracey Gaudry, the first female vice president of the UCI, said last year that she sees the minimum wage as part of a larger picture – the duty of care the sport has to its athletes. She wants to “raise the bar in a way that is substantial and real, not undercooked and token” and speaks of “professionalising the duty of care” to include housing and transport, sound medical and coaching facilities and decent equipment, all underpinned by robust contracts. But Gaudry’s sense of frustration at the pace of change is palpable and many riders continue to be left high and dry by teams that withhold prize money. Financial abuse can be every bit as real as physical and sexual intimidation in trapping women in exploitative situations.

Kathryne Bertine, author of The Road Less Taken and director of the Half the Road documentary has written about her own experiences on the road, sharing bunk beds in stranger’s houses. This is often the reality for women, for whom prize money is enough to buy a beer and a barquette of frites and who would positively welcome a gender pay gap of “only” 35%.

O’Donnell, who became a professional at the age of 35 after a career in medicine, thinks the greater struggles for women in the sport stem from “isolation, language barriers, complete bullying and threatening over performance and general lack of results, and overall disconnect between Anglo and EU cultures”. She cites the example of a friend who rode for an Italian team where she was sexually assaulted and bullied. It chimes with another of the report’s findings: “The Commission was told that the managers were often from male cycling and were not of a quality to get a job in men’s road cycling.” There are many excellent male managers in the sport who are there through choice but there are others who exploit their position of power and authority over the women they coach.

The World Health Organisation’s report on Violence and Injury Prevention identifies a range of risk factors for sexual violence, including poverty, male sexual entitlement and a culture of male superiority and female inferiority. Women riders, who are often far from home, underpaid or not paid at all, living a rootless existence where the word of their (often male) team manager is law, are in just such an environment.

That CIRC identified both financial and sexual exploitation in the sport is both shocking and not shocking at all. When the cycling writer Sarah Connolly asked why the mainstream media have not picked up on CIRC’s allegations, she received a sarcastic reply from Joe Papp – one of the riders who spoke to the commission.

It’s clear that cultural and structural change is needed in women’s cycling. The UCI, under impulsion from their Women’s Commission, are already kickstarting the implementation of a two-tier system designed to raise the bar without breaking the system and seeing teams collapse under the weight of unreasonable expectation.

At a team level, women are also driving change. Rochelle Gilmore, the former cyclist and current owner of the Wiggle-Honda team, spoke to me about the way she signs riders. “A lot of athletes think they’ll be selected on results, but I’m looking for potential. I’m not interested in what you have done but what you will do in the next three years. Your potential as a person, to have a good career, to be a bike rider.” Her riders need to be open to developing the sport for future athletes. “If they’re not willing to invest the time then this isn’t the team for them. If they just want to win bike races it’s not the place for them because it’s bigger than that.”

Wiggle-Honda are well resourced in terms of the women’s sport but the British team Matrix Pro Cycling deserve kudos for building a positive team environment on a much smaller budget – and with male sporting director Stef Wyman. But further down the food chain the reality can be ugly.

In setting up Guildford’s Rape and Sexual Abuse Support Centre cycling scheme, Cathie Smith, chair and cycle leader, wrote: “The group is something we’ve wanted to do since 2010, when I started to realise how much confidence it would give survivors. Those who have suffered these experiences have confidence issues and so this is a scheme to help them by giving them a good starting point. This is really about trying to provide a safe environment and trying to get survivors outdoors, because people who have been abused often struggle with going outside. What we’re really doing is aiming to empower them to recover.”

These are laudable aims and the scheme has proved a huge success. It highlights the good that cycling has historically done and continues to do for women: bringing confidence, mobility and wellbeing. But once a woman on a bicycle rides away from the safe confines of the all-woman group ride or enters the professional arena then the sexism, from street to elite level, becomes endemic.

Marianne Vos is the undisputed star of women’s cycling. For her, the real cultural change starts with “recognition and appreciation”. “Today men and women train together more often, because many men’s teams have their own women’s teams,” she has said. “That professionalism has been very important for us.” Vos thinks male riders now have a deeper appreciation of the hard work and sacrifice the women’s peloton has put into the sport: “In 2015 the recognition and respect of their male counterparts is the most natural thing in the world.” As for the tired old argument in favour of continued inequality between men’s and women’s cycling, physiological difference, she is quietly dismissive. “That’s just a given, nothing more, nothing less,” she says.

The picture is changing, driven by committed women and their male allies from grassroots to the corridors of Aigle. But that one sentence in the CIRC report should ring serious alarm bells for UCI president Brian Cookson.

Chris Garrison, who gave up a lucrative career on Wall Street to travel around the US in a van empowering women to get on their bikes and ride, is now the media maven at Trek. I asked her for her reaction to the report. “Many people wondered if the report would be revelatory before publication and comments about its content subsequent to publication are that it doesn’t contain information that wasn’t already known or credibly speculated,” she says. “Well, actually it does contain new information, complete with shock factor. It’s in the mentions of women’s cycling that one will find it.”

She is neither surprised nor shocked that the media prefer to rehash the well-worn doping “revelations”. “The simple fact that this has been ignored in commentary by both the media and those in the industry is indicative of the issues surrounding women’s cycling in the larger context: that it is often ignored and marginalised.”

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