Pooley. Binda. Again

13»

Comments

  • frenchfighter
    frenchfighter Posts: 30,642
    Anyhow.....................Rai Sport 2 did have 5 minutes of the race, last night.
    Saw Pooley's lethal attack from way back in the group. A couple tried in vain to bridge but were shut down by team mates. After that, it was celebration time. The only thing dull was the weather. Pound for pound, Pooley is a phenomenon. Certainly impressed Paolo Savoldelli, Rai's regular new presenter/expert.

    There are 45mins or so of the race on the link I posted.
    Contador is the Greatest
  • frenchfighter
    frenchfighter Posts: 30,642
    10th in Flanders, 10secs back:

    tumblr_lj3xgqd6od1qa3ggpo1_500.jpg
    Contador is the Greatest
  • inkyfingers
    inkyfingers Posts: 4,400
    10th in Flanders, 10secs back:

    tumblr_lj3xgqd6od1qa3ggpo1_500.jpg

    Blimey, thats quite impressive considering she must weigh about the same as my left leg!
    "I have a lovely photo of a Camargue horse but will not post it now" (Frenchfighter - July 2013)
  • mattshrops
    mattshrops Posts: 1,134
    i for one will definitely watch any pro womens racing they would care to put on tv. dont give a sh@t what some geezers opinion of whats better is.

    pooley is a star, anyone know what her power to weight figures are? 8)
    Death or Glory- Just another Story
  • deejay
    deejay Posts: 3,138
    I've been a fan of hers since I saw the work she put in at the Olympics for the benefit of the GB team.
    Her Palmares have given me great pleasure since then.

    The one thing you are all doing is talking about her and Womens Cycle Racing which can only be good for the sport.
    So keep doing it inside and outside the sport as it will all help.

    Over 15 years ago I was involved with womens racing in Kent/Surrey/Sussex and we were a bit shocked to hear the comments coming from their evening gatherings.
    A three day race was too hard it seems because a stage went over the Ashdown Forest and others went over more hills in the area.

    I find these present Ladies very well worth watching, for the effort they put in and hope to see something of them at Fleche Wallonne next week.
    I was present at "FW" some years ago to see some of them in tears because of the Snow and the cold which meant they couldn't put their brakes on.
    Some came crashing down while others went off course being chased by sevice vehicles. (was that the year Bartoli won the mens race ??)

    Keep talking as they are still getting better.

    Forza Emma.
    Organiser, National Championship 50 mile Time Trial 1972
  • frenchfighter
    frenchfighter Posts: 30,642
    Mr Watson saying something stupid again:

    tumblr_lej0a5pv8O1qa3ggpo1_500.png

    In response to:
    tumblr_lej0haAh4E1qa3ggpo1_500.png

    And also:
    tumblr_lej04vqJ1u1qa3ggpo1_500.png

    Pooley on Cycling Sexism:
    http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/lat ... exism.html
    Contador is the Greatest
  • Tusher
    Tusher Posts: 2,762
    Been said before, but the UCI can order any male pro-team that it must have a women's team as well.
    And running women's races with the mens will ensure TV coverage=increased sponsorship.

    Didn't realise that women's racing was the largest growing area- thanks for the links, ff
  • LangerDan
    LangerDan Posts: 6,132
    Given that Vroomen couldn't afford to keep a mens ProContinental team funded and had get taken over by, sorry, merged with, Garmin how does he imagine sponsors would manage to support two separate squads.?


    I would love to see womens cycling better supported - a friend of mine has spent several years racing in the womens pro peleton on the Continent. However, as with any professional (as opposed to amateur or Olympic) sport, the market has decided how much money the sport is currently worth. Given that there are always agents and managers looking to maximise the value of their 10% cut, there are definite, if venal, motivations to increase rider contract values. However this hasn't happened.
    Outside of the very top teams, the budgets for womens pro squads are astonishingly small - most would be run on far less than €100,000 per annum. Many of the riders are not paid a salary and exist on sports grants or out-of-season jobs. To be honest, much of the womens peleton is funded on a scale more akin to a local sponsored club, rather than a ProTour team.

    At a time when TV coverage of top-level mens racing is supported by niche companies like Sidi and Salice (rather than the Fords or Carlings or Emirates), it doesn't auger well in getting TV- scale advertisers to pay for prime time coverage of womens events.


    I don't know what the solution is, but I'll take a pop:

    For 1 year

    1) Reduce the size of the womens peleton. Yup, reduce it. Because of the low "cost of entry", the athletic difference between the top and bottom rungs is far greater than in the standard mens ProTour race. It would be more like having a few amateur clubs thrown into the mix on RvV or M-SR . This means that on the more ardous races, the large time gaps and numbers of DNFs give the impression of the whole thing being less than "elite".

    2) Pick a small number of key races - where a womens race will be run in conjunction with the mens,much as they do with Flanders, Plouay etc.

    3) Keep the womens races shorter. While some riders may want the equality of riding the same parcours as the mens, it is a very big leap from the usual womens race distances and you will see very depleted fields finishing. Just becasue Gerald Vroomen managed to ride the P-R parcours doesn't automatically mean that 80 women, many below 50kg, can race it. Hell, the smaller sized male riders usually avoid the race if they can.

    3) "Someone" - UCI, capitation on ProTour licence fees or whatever, pays for x hours of prime-time TV coverage on Eurosport.

    After this, it is up to the riders and teams themselves to create sufficiently interesting racing to attract the necessary audience.

    If after a year of this subsidised racing, sponsors still don't want to be involved, let it revert to its current state. The market will have spoken and that is the ultimate arbiter of professional sports.
    'This week I 'ave been mostly been climbing like Basso - Shirley Basso.'
  • knedlicky
    knedlicky Posts: 3,097
    More TV coverage for women’s cycling isn’t just a matter of sponsorship or whether it has enough excitement and quality. For good audience figures, TV channels have to serve their audience and although excitement (the ‘stimulation factor’) and quality (part of the ‘entertainment factor’ – quality need not be that high if the entertainment aspect compensates), TV channels consider other factors too:

    - the ‘ identification factor’. A programme/broadcast succeeds better if a viewer identifies (even subconsciously) with some of its content. In the case of a sport, this obviously includes watching a sport he actually does (or would like to), especially if he has a favoured person/team. But it also includes identification through gender, looks, nationality, social class, and even shared taste in sports gear, energy drink, car, lifestyle and money (albeit perhaps desired more than realized by the viewer - occasionally the identification link is sublime envy). It can also mean the viewer feels the sports person concerned has similar traits (or traits the viewer admires/approves of) or feels that they have both experienced similar trials in life (or the sports person has survived some which the viewer fears).

    - the ‘usefulness factor ‘, meaning being able to comfortably chat with acquaintances or colleagues about the sporting event or sports person in the pub, at work, in a club or with the shop assistant/barber/car mechanic/person in the bus/train/plane, etc.

    Since the average TV sports viewers are middle-aged men, only half of whom do any sport, and most people you meet in the pub, at work, etc, are also middle-aged men, some of whom wouldn’t normally feel comfortable enthusiastically discussing a woman’s (sporting) performance with an occasional acquaintance, women’s sport is at a major disadvantage in the eyes of TV channels.
  • hotoph88
    hotoph88 Posts: 58
    All this rubbish about "viewability" sponsorship and "entertainment" is a smokescreen. I think too much credit is being given to the competence of the media. Whether things are or are not covered by the media is far more down to history, random events and historic prejudice. Early evening, the other day, I was trying to find something - anything - worthwhile to watch. Ended up at some age group, engine size restriction, motorbike racing. The commentator was trying to get me interested in the two Under 14 boys whose dads had bought them a fast motorbike each and whose name he knew, as opposed to the 25 others who he could only recognise from the start list if he had a clear picture of the number on the bike. They were ripping around Donnington or some-such having a great time and good luck to them. Entertainment it was not. But as to some rubbish about women's cycling not getting coverage because somehow it does not engage with Joe public - the example I watched with my own eyes clearly proves the opposite.

    That was a good post by Langer Dan. Turn the whole thing on its head and move it to another sport.

    Take 1 Joe wants to put on an athletics meet. He will have the whole suite of events for men. There will be a couple of token events for women and the women's prize money will be a tiny fraction of that for the men. It is called sexism.

    Take 2 Joe wants to put on an athletics meet. He has been talking to the media gurus and the main people who watch sport on TV are fat, white, middle-aged blokes. So in a stroke of marketing genius he limits his entry. No blacks and no females. Just white men doing stuff. Hits the marketing nail on the head. That would add racism to the mix.

    My point is, society has now moved on. We would not condone any such racist activity as above. Nor would we allow sexism to be imposed in a field of our lives where equality is now accepted. What we seem incapable of doing is facing up to the sad truth that we do accept, unacceptable levels of sexism in the way we behave and view things that are historically sexist in execution.

    We need to step back. The London Marathon was not just for blokes. Would Dave Bedford to try and make it so, Virgin or Flora before them, would have run a mile.

    The UCI do have it in their gift to enforce. Sadly the upper echelons appear packed with individuals who appear, by their inaction, to be part of the problem and not any aspect of the solution.

    That 1st point of LangerDan's was on the button and has been an ongoing sore in the women's peloton for years. There is the valid aspect of the DNFs, although that also kicks in with the men in many races, but more in terms of the elite riders having to deal with riders who have not spent years learning to race, before having a chance to be at the front of a big race.

    I look forward to Emma's early return.
  • Tusher
    Tusher Posts: 2,762
    Half listening to Women's Hour and there was a discussion on women's football. One of the things they've done (if I heard correctly) was to change their season to the men's off-season. That way, football starved fans are more likely to follow women's football.

    No-one would be keen on racing in Belgium in December, granted, but if there was quality women's racing October to February/March, surely more race starved cycling fans would follow. I'm assuming there is no off-season for journalists and sponsors.
  • knedlicky
    knedlicky Posts: 3,097
    hotoph88 wrote:
    I think too much credit is being given to the competence of the media.
    Whether things are or are not covered by the media is far more down to ... historic prejudice.
    Competence? No. Conservative? Yes. Your second statement is very true.
  • knedlicky
    knedlicky Posts: 3,097
    Tusher wrote:
    Half listening to Women's Hour and there was a discussion on women's football. One of the things they've done (if I heard correctly) was to change their season to the men's off-season. That way, football starved fans are more likely to follow women's football.

    No-one would be keen on racing in Belgium in December, granted, but if there was quality women's racing October to February/March, surely more race starved cycling fans would follow. I'm assuming there is no off-season for journalists and sponsors.
    The change of season only applies to the Women’s Super League, the women’s football equivalent of the Premier League, not to the lower divisions in women’s football.
    One of the main reasons for the change was because the women’s teams play at grounds owned by men’s teams, and sometimes there were clashes in the fixture arrangements, and then, it was always the women’s team which had to back down.

    Analyses of spectator make-up at matches in lands where women’s football is more popular and successful, like USA, Sweden and Germany, don’t suggest this change will lead to male football-starved fans going to women’s matches. On the whole, spectators at men’s matches and spectators at women’s matches are two different sets of clientele, largely because of differing ‘identification’.
    Still, the attendances at women’s football matches might increase, because many of the potential spectators at them are judged ‘fairweather’ fans, so Summer should suit them better..
  • Tusher
    Tusher Posts: 2,762
    Aha. The Things I Learn In Bikeradar.
    But do you think that cycling spectators would be two different sets of clientele?
  • knedlicky
    knedlicky Posts: 3,097
    Not to the same extent, fortunately.

    I think your idea of trying to avoid men's and women’s racing events taking place concurrently a good idea, but I would think it’s possible to find suitable gaps in the men’s calendar, rather than have the women cope with winter.

    Years ago, a couple of the Tour de France Feminin went along part of the same route as the men’s Tour, same day a few hours in advance. Although this idea was later abandoned, and you could say the spectators along the route were only coincidental (because they’d really come to watch the men), it did give the women some valuable publicity. I’d like to see something similar done again.
    (The same idea has been used for years in German football - on Cup Final day, the women footballer teams play their Final match in the same stadium as the men’s teams, a couple of hours in advance. So those who arrive early enough, see two Finals for the price of one. For those who don't go to the stadium, TV shows both games, one after the other.)

    Another idea I’ve heard recommended to increase the popularity of women’s cycling is to have more women’s big races like the World Championship (and many amateur races), i.e. so many times around a biggish circuit. Apparently, and understandably, seeing them go past more than once draws spectators.

    I think the TV could do more to popularise it too, by promoting the likes of Pooley or Cooke more and then using them, during the 2-3 weeks before the women's event to be televised takes place, in short but regular/daily spots advertising the event. Studies in America have shown this method of advertising sports events on TV increases viewing figures by 35-40%, compared to the figures for the same or similar events when not advertised.
  • hotoph88 wrote:
    All this rubbish about "viewability" sponsorship and "entertainment" is a smokescreen. I think too much credit is being given to the competence of the media. Whether things are or are not covered by the media is far more down to history, random events and historic prejudice. Early evening, the other day, I was trying to find something - anything - worthwhile to watch. Ended up at some age group, engine size restriction, motorbike racing. The commentator was trying to get me interested in the two Under 14 boys whose dads had bought them a fast motorbike each and whose name he knew, as opposed to the 25 others who he could only recognise from the start list if he had a clear picture of the number on the bike. They were ripping around Donnington or some-such having a great time and good luck to them. Entertainment it was not. But as to some rubbish about women's cycling not getting coverage because somehow it does not engage with Joe public - the example I watched with my own eyes clearly proves the opposite..

    As a slightly off topic aside - the TV model in most club and national UK motorsport is that the race series itself is paying for the coverage, either directly or via a sponsor. This can be done to a variety of levels of cost and expertise dependent on budget, I have heard a figure of £20k mentioned for a decent season long package that could then be placed with Motors etc. Also - motorsport is relatively 'easy' to film, the cars / bikes etc come past every minute and half or so a couple of fixed position cameras and a presenter in the paddock and you are sorted.
    Chocolate makes your clothes shrink
  • blazing_saddles
    blazing_saddles Posts: 21,741
    Heads up.
    According to my Sky EPG, both Binda and the women's Flanders race are on UK Eurosport, tomorrow night at 11-15pmish.
    "Science is a tool for cheaters". An anonymous French PE teacher.
  • hotoph88
    hotoph88 Posts: 58
    Thanks Blazing and JP1985 on the other thread. I would have missed it otherwise. I watched it straight after L-B-L. It is hard to know what to say, the contrasts were enormous in terms of professionalism of coverage. What made L-B-L was the information on the time gaps & distance to go and the viewer could see what was happening and emphasize with a rider's plight - attack and gradually getting hauled in/staying away. Harmon and Kelly's commentary added greatly to the thrill.

    Sadly sticking 2 races into 30 minutes with zero information on times or distance to go and it seeming that Harmon had no idea on what happened to breaks that formed and then miraculously disappeared by the time of the cut to the next shot, all left a very sad taste in the mouth. It was appalling. I would not dream of showing anyone that if I wanted to get them interested in the sport. (Harmon needs to be serious about his homework before he next commentates on the girls. I think most write ups had Pooley breaking away at 50km into a 122km race. Harmon seemed to leave in my mind the idea that the race was 70km and Pooley broke away at 50km. )

    Yes it got women's racing on the TV, [tick that box - equality served].

    OK Binda - "lone rider breaks away early and chasers don't get their act together" is always a boring story, even if it was a superb ride by Emma. Reducing the gap to 2 min 44 @ 44km to go was a critical moment, but the chase and this denouement was ignored. However Flanders was far more active and should have made a good story, but the weird cutting and lack of continuity just ruined it as a viewing spectacle. Better to bite the bullet, 15 mins per race is pure tokenism and nothing worthwhile will result. Make it 30 mins per race and then Harmon will have a scene that stays in shot long enough for him to get something worthwhile out before we cut to a new scene.

    Due to the lack of professionalism of editing and the consequent constraint on commentary, I cannot think of anything it did that was positive, apart from present us pictures of riders we read about but never see. No fan base was going to be built on that ! Perhaps not 10 second interviews with a number of riders but 1 decent interview with 1 rider each program. It all reminded me of ITV Saturday World of Sport and their coverage of the Tour in the 1970's or the World Cross champs. That did more to put people off taking up an interest in the sport of cycling than anything else at the time !

    Common Eurosport and Harmon - you are capable of far better than what we were shown last night!
  • mattshrops
    mattshrops Posts: 1,134
    hotoph88, yes i agree it was fairly poor coverage. also agree that at least they showed something of it.
    to be fair to harmon ive seen similar highlights packages on eurosport covering some stages of mens tours. i think they give him the tape and expect him(or whoever) to stick a bit of commentary on it.
    imo the blame for that (and definitely for the low viewing times) falls on the schedulers/hierarchy at eurosport.
    having said all that eurosport are the only channel giving such general good coverage of our sport.
    given a choice between channels ill always watch eurosport because of their commitment to cycling in general.
    more(and better) womens coverage would be good
    Death or Glory- Just another Story
  • blazing_saddles
    blazing_saddles Posts: 21,741
    Yes, the coverage was pretty basic.
    However, it did serve to highlight the lack of tactical awareness.
    Flanders:
    Pooley, riding for Garmin and wearing the world cup leader's jersey,
    loses world cup points, to a Garmin team mate, who finishes one place ahead. :oops:
    "Science is a tool for cheaters". An anonymous French PE teacher.
  • RichN95.
    RichN95. Posts: 27,137
    Mr Watson saying something stupid again:
    And also:
    tumblr_lej04vqJ1u1qa3ggpo1_500.png

    While Vroomen can talk a good game, do his actions back it up?

    The much appreciated Cervelo 'Beyond the Peloton' series:

    Films about the Men's team: 27

    Films about the Women's team: 2 (a two parter about a TTT when the men's team was folding)


    His own team's actions suggest he knows where the audience lies, so why does expect others to buck the trend first?
    Twitter: @RichN95
  • inkyfingers
    inkyfingers Posts: 4,400
    Forgive me if someone has already posted these but videos of Flanders & Alfredo Binda womens races on Garmin Cervelo website

    http://garmin.cervelo.com/en_us/team-ga ... cup-video/

    Pooley not only finished 10th at Flanders but also went out on the attack on the Eikenberg, fantastic rider.
    "I have a lovely photo of a Camargue horse but will not post it now" (Frenchfighter - July 2013)
  • inkyfingers
    inkyfingers Posts: 4,400
    Forgive me if someone has already posted these but videos of Flanders & Alfredo Binda womens races on Garmin Cervelo website

    http://garmin.cervelo.com/en_us/team-ga ... cup-video/

    Pooley not only finished 10th at Flanders but also went out on the attack on the Eikenberg, fantastic rider.
    "I have a lovely photo of a Camargue horse but will not post it now" (Frenchfighter - July 2013)