Cycling: are women catching up with men

Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC-BY-SA 3.0 / via Wikimedia

In a petition already signed by 88,000 people, riders including Emma Pooley and Marianne Vos ask for women to be allowed to participate in the Tour de France and other cycling events:

We seek not to race against the men, but to have our own professional field running in conjunction with the men’s event, at the same time, over the same distances, on the same days, with modifications in start/finish times so neither gender’s race interferes with the other.

Among other things, they want to «debunk the myths of physical ‘limitations’ placed upon female athletes». So how about those limitations? In an opinion article in NRC Handelsblad, Sanne van Oosten of WOMEN Inc. argues that the world hour record for men (49.7 km) is only slightly higher than for women (46.1 km). And Guardian cycling columnist William Fotheringham observes:

Over the years there has been a convergence between the distances men and women race, as men’s professional races are becoming progressively shorter, and women’s gradually longer.

He doesn’t specify which races this applies to. The distances of the UCI world championships haven’t changed much, at least not since 2004. Below are the distances of the Olympic individual road race since 1984, the first year women were included. I collected the data from different sources - surprisingly there doesn’t appear to be a single source that has consistent records of distances and times over that period (not even Wikipedia!). Of course, to better understand the data one should also consider how much climbing was involved.

Distances Olympic individual road race, 1984-2012

The absolute difference hasn’t changed much: men ride about 110 km more than women. The relative difference has decreased substantially: until 1992, the distance for men was 2.4 times the distance for women; by 2012 that factor had shrunk to 1.8. So this confirms that distances are converging. Of course, the distance women race is still shorter than most Tour stages.

In a slightly cryptic article, it has been argued that the distances for women must be shorter than those for men: otherwise women’s speed would drop and they wouldn’t be able to display their technical skills («corner, change direction, or maintain their trajectory while looking at their opponents») optimally. So is women’s speed dropping as Olympic races become longer?

Average speed of winner Olympic individual road race, 1984-2012

The graph above shows the average speed of the winners of the Olympic road races since 1984. While the difference between men and women has somewhat increased, it’s not the case that women’s speed has dropped. On the contrary, the winner of 2012 was 8% faster than the winner of 1984 (over a distance that was two-thirds longer).

In short, I can see no particular reason why women riders shouldn’t get the chance to prove themselves in the 2014 Tour de France.

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