Competitive cycling appears to be organized to reward men. Women's über-champion Nicole Cooke has just retired and had a thing or two to say...
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At 11, she started to race, and within months had beaten the boys in the under-12 national championship. At 14, she discovered there was no national competition for her to enter – she could not race with the boys, there was nothing for the girls, and they wouldn't allow her to enter the women's. So she and her father started campaigning. By the following year, a national championship for girls had been established. By 18, she had left school with three As at A-level (physics, maths and biology) and that same year she became the youngest rider to win the senior women's title at the British National Cyclocross Championships. The rest is history.
I say I can't believe she's not worth a fortune after all her success. Look, she says, she didn't come into cycling for the money; no woman does. "I knew I wasn't going to be a millionaire at the end of it, but there was a good chance we'd have fantastic races going over historic climbs in France and Italy. And that was fine. But to see it crumble has been just so sad."
Unbelievably, there is no longer a Tour de France for women. It's such a waste, she says. "The UCI [Union Cycliste International] is missing out on a huge opportunity. Look at women's tennis, and its global superstars. The UCI is cutting all that potential in half just by focusing on the men's side. It could have two hugely rewarding sports going on. You have to ask what the people are doing who run our sport," she says.
The very next sentence, she tells me. "The UCI has spent more time setting up the libel suits against Paul Kimmage [a journalist who exposed doping] and Floyd Landis when he said Lance Armstrong was using drugs; it spent all its time on that rather than developing women's cycling." When sponsors dropped out because of doping, she says, it was the women who suffered most. "It hit us 10 times as hard because a little bit of money has so much impact on women's cycling."
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read her full statement - she has a few very harsh things to say about doping and Lance
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