Read closer......already been seeing this on Bikeforums

This wasn't reaching an actual peloton or group. This was getting near the back of support vehicles where a few drops/mechanicals probably had some stragglers.

Let's not confuse this with someone bridging a half hour gap to the actual main group. Much less the entire women's peloton bridging to the men's peloton. It's very misleading.

The organizers flubbed, but, did make the right call. That break wouldn't have stuck anyway given that course, and it would have been more detrimental to the outcome of the women's race to allow her to actually catch anything and gain the draft advantage of vehicles/people.

It sucks, but weird stuff has happened also in men's cobble classics involving breaks and railroad crossings. Which, in the men's races, often people caught jumping the railroad crossing gate are DQ'd.

Let's not make this out to be more than it is.

If the women raced the distances the men did (or even a distance that resulted in a similar race duration), something like this would be far far less likely to happen.

It happens all the time in US road and circuit races. The start of a race is often pretty leisurely. A rider (or riders) from a slower group will try to catch the one ahead so they can get a free ride drafting in that group and win. Or it can happen more accidentally if the group behind is actually racing and the one in front is cruising.

Because this happened, Bigla Pro and Nicole Hanselmann have an article written up about them and it made it all the way to ST. Did you previously know such a team and rider existed last week? The break wasn't going to stick...riders go out on solo breaks partly to help their team and mostly to get some media attention...mission accomplished...I say it played pretty well if you ask me.

All that said, you can point to the race organizers for dropping the ball on this. Sure...they easily could have used a 20 or 30 minute gap to separate the 2 races to ensure this didn't happen. Just know that race organizers are operating with limited resources. I mean...wouldn't it be easier to have the races on separate days? But then the cost to do that would be too high and one race doesn't happen. Take a guess at which one would be cancelled. And every single intersection that needs to be shut down or monitored has some form of cost. If you have cops shutting down an intersection 10 minutes before the men's field arrives and then has to wait there potentially 40 minutes later before the women's field comes through, that's a long time to manage one place before those resources can leave and likely move onto another area they need to manage. The race organizer is going to want to have that one area managed for as short a time as possible, thus they are going to try and stagger the men's and women's race as close as they can while hoping they don't overlap. It's a balancing act of trying to make sure the races are don't interfere, managing available resources, and having as little impact to the community you're racing through as possible. You can't always win unless you have high levels of resources and buy in from the community.

Replying to the general thread. This was just unlucky. Probably everyone here could have stayed in the men's peloton in that first hour given the slow pace. It is unusual that the first hour is not full of attacks trying to get in the breakaway.

As an organizer they did not have many options. I'd have considered telling the men to speed up or be taken out of the race. 30 km/h in a peloton is just silly. They can all easily do 33 solo without breaking much of a sweat.

that's stupid. this has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with tactics. The men's race was not animated so of course they got caught from behind. I don't care if it was women, juniors, 50+ Cat 123, etc.

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I guess I'm missing the point here somewhere. This race is known to start slow as someone above pointed out. The men normally start attacking later in the race. I'm assuming the woman in question knew this just like anyone else that follows the sport does, and she made a tactical decision to do what she did for that very reason. As far as I know there is nothing in the rules that prevents her from doing what she did.

That leads me to question the "there was nothing else the organizers could do" statement that is being made. There are actually 2 things they could have done and they chose not to do either:

They could have let the race go as is. I don't see the problem with her racing through the men's support vehicles. The men do it when they have a serious mechanical - no big deal. Does she get an unfair drafting advantage? Maybe, but I doubt if its much, and that's not the point.

The could have noted the time she was ahead of the peloton when they stopped her and let her start that much time ahead at the restart.

What they did was stop a legitimate break away for no reason other than she is a woman.

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It might be worth pointing out that they actually did the 2nd
http://www.cyclingnews.com/...loop-het-nieuwsblad/

Yeah because the duration of a race doesn't influence the tactics at all.

If people want to use this race to focus on the inequality between mens and womens cycling, i think the fact the mens race had at least 100k broadcasted live in multiple languages and the women didnt even have the last 1k or finish broadcasted at all is a bigger deal than a solo break that didnt have a chance getting held up (agreed awful race organization though).

I'm the first to support women's cycling, but it wouldn't have mattered if it was the men's U23 or junior race instead of the women's. You can't let fields inter-mix at the pro level. Maybe poor planning, but the proper reaction in response.

I didn't read the article posted above, but the article I read on either VeloNews or CyclingNews said that the officials did take times and the riders were allowed to restart with those gaps.

You don’t think there is much advantage drafting through the men’s support vehicles?

Wow, this story has gone viral! Do a google search of "female cyclist" and there are hundreds of hits under the news tab on this story! Problem with it, all the headlines are misleading and at no point in this race were the women racing faster than the men! Instead of what is being reported, the leading men had increased their initial gap of 8 to 10 minutes to a lead well over 14 minutes. I've written a detailed article about this here: https://triathleteguru.blogspot.com/...-to-sensational.html

Want sensational? Use this as your headline - "Female cyclist forced to wait after catching men, yet still manages to finish before men!" Yep, that's right, the entire women's peloton finished before the men did, only they went 67km less... But I'm surprised nobody has used that headline yet!

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Tony
http://www.triathleteguru.com

Since my last post I have come also figured out several things. The lead breakaway group of 4 men with the 14 minute lead on the peloton were already through the first 2km section of cobbles and the bulk of the men's peloton were in the cobbles or just about to them. Also, several miles after the cobbles is where the women's race took a right turn while the men's race kept going straight, so there was a major divergence between the two races coming up and the plan was always to get the men past the point where the women turn so that the course could be altered to funnel all the women right. Unfortunately, this information has not been communicated and if one were to read any of the multiple viral articles out there about this they would find this common theme - "the women were racing faster, the men should have been stopped, this was a sexist decision". However, based on all the facts, what happened was the only decision that could have been made, the race is just dong a piss poor job with their PR!

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Tony
http://www.triathleteguru.com

Other than this is against the rules at all levels of competitive cycling, yeah there is no problem with it.

It has nothing to do with her being a woman. If this was a men U23 race instead and they caught the pro men, they would stand down. And it's no question what field is driving all of the revenue and therefore to suggest the pro mens field should stand down for anyone is absurd.

This whole story is the epitome of "making yourself a victim". It's a joke. If I was the promoter I would fix the problem by eliminating the womens field next year, unless they can generate equal sponsorship revenue as compared to the men.

Or the media has an agenda and isn't interested in reporting the facts here;) The race organizers can't control what the press writes.

What's more interesting, a minor screwup in race planning, or a sexist conspiracy by men to keep women down, even though the women are riding faster.

lol, this is what I've been thinking too! I'm probably fighting a losing battle with this one and just need to let it go! I just don't understand why even the race organization itself doesn't seem interested in getting the facts straight!

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Tony
http://www.triathleteguru.com

It's not that big of a deal. I think you can relax now.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.

I would speculate that 99.99% of the media have no idea about bike racing.

I already posted my thoughts on this topic on BF, I'll cross post here.

This has been whipped up into some sort of controversy when in fact:

1. Neutralization of a race happens all the time for a variety of reasons.
2. A very strange / uncommon set of circumstances had to be present for this to occur: the women's race followed a separate course later in the race so this could only have happened early, the men's race was completely dawdling in the early stages (~30kph) while the women's break was extremely aggressive. Lastly, the womens' race started only 8-10 minutes behind the men to simplify logistics and maximize exposure for the women. It was sort of a perfect storm / bad luck scenario.
3. Given the circumstances, neutralizing the women's race was the best option. Allowing the women's break to mingle with the men's race would have caused havoc with logistics and impacted rider safety. This is a race on public roads with precise road closings designed to limit impact to drivers. That all goes to hell when you have racers / team cars / commissaire cars / motos mixing.
4. The race organizers are to be applauded both for sponsoring a world-class women's race as well as trying to increase the profile of the women's race by having it follow closely behind the men's race and benefit from the crowds. Instead, they're getting sledged in the press as "anti-women" somehow, often by journalists that clearly know nothing about cycling. No good deed goes unpunished.
5. There's a 0% probability that the women's break would have stayed away anyway. It was a standard morning TV-time breakaway, nothing more.

The only criticism I have for the race organizers is that the commissaires should have contacted the men's team cars and told them to tell their riders to get a move on. However, that's an unusual call to make.

The only criticism I have for the race organizers is that the commissaires should have contacted the men's team cars and told them to tell their riders to get a move on. However, that's an unusual call to make.

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It's not an unusual call, it's an impossible call to make. Race organizers would have been laughed at with that call to tell the teams to have their riders start "riding faster". So as you say this was just apparently the perfect storm "shit" moment.

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Brooks Doughtie, M.S.
Exercise Physiology
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I agree it's not going to happen in World Tour racing, but I've had it happen in amateur racing. Official pulled up next to us and said, "The pro women are coming. You have two choices. I can neutralize you and you wait for about 30 minutes so you won't re-pass them. Or you can start racing your bikes." We started bike racing.

But they're not going to do that to World Tour men for a variety of reasons, most of them good.

directon could have been given to ride faster or get pulled off the course. Happens occasionally in amateur races.