Team time trial mixed relay and the debate around co-ed racing - World Championships

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The Team Time Trial Mixed Relay made history on Sunday as the first mixed gender event ever held at the UCI Road World Championships. It replaces the Team Time Trial, ridden by trade teams, which had been a World Championship fixture since 2012. The new event features national teams of professional and U23 riders, consisting of three male and three female riders.

The men set off together to ride a short first lap (on Sunday it was the technical 14km Harrogate circuit), and when the second man crossed the line, it was the women’s turn to do exactly the same thing. The team’s overall final time is taken when the second woman crossed the line.

Their closest rivals were the Germans, who came second, while - perhaps appropriately enough given Britain’s history in the discipline - the home team came third. But apart from the almost foregone conclusion the Dutch would win, no one really had any idea how the rest of the event would go, and that wasn’t just because of the technical course or the Yorkshire weather that was primed for ambush.

That means a team has to think very carefully about whether to drop a teammate who can’t hold the pace, when there’s a risk that one of the remaining two riders might also run out of steam or suffer a mechanical. The shortness of the course only adds to the intensity of these ‘should-we-stay-or-should-we-go’ decisions, with riders already turning themselves inside out to maintain a super fast pace in the knowledge that only a matter of seconds may determine the final ranking.

As we saw on Sunday, this made for some nail biting racing, in particular for the Italian team, who lost third place on the podium when Elisa Longo Borghini suffered a puncture. Her two teammates pressed on ahead while she waited what felt like an age for a new bike. Against all rational expectations, she rode her way back to her teammates, caught them on the closing straight and then catapulted forward, towing them to the finish—only to lose out to the British by five seconds.

The Italians would be justified in feeling especially bitter about their bad luck, following their experience at the European Championships in August, when the race format was tried for the first time. On that occasion the German and Italian men’s teams had been neck and neck for second place, but the Italian women lost time when they appeared to wait for their third rider who struggled to hold the pace. They presumably decided on Sunday not to make that mistake again. Sadly, given the form Longo Borghini was in, they would probably have done better to wait.

There were other parts of the race that were confusing, such as the fact the men finished in a different spot to where their female teammates started, making the race feel more like two separate events rather than an actual relay. Based on the Dutch team’s experiences already in August, Gunnewijk expressed her concerns about the professionalism in certain details of the format, in particular with the potential for a messy handover.

For spectators, there was plenty of fun to be had in number-crunching and comparing the men’s and women’s intermediate times in addition to those of the team as a whole, though what you really wanted was a graph or a chart at the bottom of the TV screen with all the data to hand. In the end, it was hard to keep on top of who’d done what. For the riders, however, especially on the teams that didn’t have a particularly strong female element, the new format risks being painfully humiliating. Witnessing the Slovenian women’s team fall apart felt particularly cruel.

Over the last couple of decades many other sports have been introducing mixed formulas. Biathlon introduced a mixed event in 2005 with the ambition to bring more women into a male-dominated sport, triathlon introduced a mixed event at the world championships in 2009, in swimming there have been mixed relays since 2014 and there are many more sports besides, from track to judo to cross country skiing which are creating new ways of getting male and female athletes competing together. Closer to road racing, there are mixed events in mountain biking and BMX.

In 2017 the International Olympic Committee upped the ante by introducing its Gender Equality Review Project with the ambition to create an equal gender balance across all Olympic sports. As a result, the 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo will feature 18 mixed events compared to the 9 held at Rio in 2016. Mixed events are just one part of the IOC’s ambitious strategy, which also calls for more women’s events and seeks to get more women involved at all levels, whether they are athletes, coaches or administrators.

Responding to emailed questions last week, UCI President David Lappartient declared that, “gender equality is key in our federation's roadmap Agenda 2022” and he pointed to progress made, “on the front of athletes’ participation,” and in terms of prize money at UCI Championships and World Cups. (In 2017 the UCI introduced prize parity, after Lizzie Deignan revealed that she had received £2,000 for winning the women’s World Championship Road Race in 2015, whereas Peter Sagan received £20,000 in the men’s event.)

“Based on the experience in Yorkshire, which we’re sure will draw a great deal of enthusiasm from the fans,” he added, “we’re ready to consider, together with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) if it so wishes, the possibility of a future inclusion of this new innovative format at the Olympic Games as part of the existing road cycling programme. This event would be perfectly in line with our objective of total gender parity at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games with the aim of male and female cyclists enjoying an equal number of quotas, events and medals.”

Though that ‘vice-versa’ did in fact take place on Sunday with the German women posting a much stronger relative time to the men, Lefevere talking in terms of the women letting down the men does add another layer of meaning to the expression ‘race of truth’. For as it became abundantly clear on Sunday, the event ultimately offers a ranking of the federations that are the most supportive of their female riders. Where the disparities between the men and women were most pronounced (while subtracting time lost to punctures), one can probably assume the federations in question have treated their female riders as an afterthought. The pity is that in the visceral moment of the race itself, it’s the women who are made to look bad.

“It’s not a made-for-TV event,” counters Connie Carpenter-Phinney, winner of the inaugural women’s road race at the Olympics in 1984. Time trialing is part of her family business: between herself, her husband Davis Phinney and their son Taylor, there are more Olympic, world championship and national time trial and pursuit medals than you can possibly fit in one shoebox. Yet this concept leaves her cold.

"A relay is where each leg is usually carried out by an individual. It’s really exciting—think about the 400m relay on the track, where you’re handing up a baton. A relay should be exciting and it should be close at the end, not a time trial. A relay isn’t a time trial, it’s man against man, man against woman, whatever. You could have a fantastic relay event with two men and two women on it, and with a massed start, with the top 12 nations, and have it on a fairly short course. It’s not exciting to have three person teams—nobody races in three person teams, so how do you even train for this? How do you prepare for it?"

The Tour brings together the best riders in the world, in peak condition, who, it increasingly seems, are prepared to risk their lives in order to achieve their goals. Bike racing has always been a bit of an arms race, and this is not just a veiled reference to doping: consider extreme diets, wind tunnel tested frames and wheels, disk brakes, the Chris Froome ‘tuck’ that became one of the Tour’s talking points in 2016 and all those other ‘marginal gains’ that riders, sports directors, manufacturers, doctors and nutritionists sweat over. The net result is that we now have insanely high average speeds in men’s racing, with stage 17 of this year’s Vuelta a case in point: at an average speed of 50.63kph, it’s believed to be the fastest bike race over 200km ever ridden.

Women’s racing simply doesn’t have the resources to engage in the same tactics to the same degree. The peloton is smaller, and therefore cannot build the same express train momentum. Most riders have to take on extra jobs to pay the rent, and therefore can’t devote every moment to optimal performance. Teams are smaller, and mostly don’t have the luxury of letting some riders peak for specific races. The differences between men and women can’t simply be reduced to their V02max or power to weight ratios.

In the early days of US racing, all the great female riders regularly raced against top male amateurs. They included Audrey McElmury, the first-ever US road race world champion in 1969, Connie Carpenter-Phinney and Inga Thompson, who each represented the strongest riders of three consecutive generations. All three riders would frequently be in the breaks of men’s cat 1-2 races and were capable of finishing in the top ten.

While she points out that she was never a professional, neither, for a long time, was her husband, who was so good at winning races people called him ‘The Cash Register’. During her era, she points out, the Olympics still had an amateur code: so the races Carpenter-Phinney took part in could also feature the best male riders, too, like Phinney, or Alexi Grewal, who won the 1984 Olympics road race. It wasn’t until 1985—a year after his wife retired—that Phinney joined 7-Eleven, the first American professional men’s team to race in Europe.

Inga Thompson recently explained that the top international women’s races she took part in between 1984 and 1993 were, "quite similar in the sense of the speed and intensity," to the men’s races, but the men’s races "were longer and there was more depth." The main difference, she considered, was that in the top women’s races, "I could make more decisive moves and every once in a while get away. But it wasn’t very often that I rode off the front and there were also times with the men where I almost got away."

Even now, Connie Carpenter-Phinney contends, "all the top, top women today could jump into a men’s race and keep up to a certain point. Now men’s races when they’re 230 kilometres long, there aren’t that many women that are trained to go that distance but the top women have the bike handling, the power and the savvy, because sitting in is technical and tactical, it’s not all about power."

In France in the years before and after the Second World War, there was a thriving mixed tandem-racing scene, which drew hordes of spectators as teams thrashed their way around a circuit, sometimes at higher average speeds than the male pros that rode a professional version of the same race. One of the female stars of that time was called Lyli Herse, who would later become a multiple French national road race champion. Later in life she ran a women’s team, and persuaded the French cycling federation to let elite women race against junior men. It worked pretty well, she said: the women raced hard to prove to the men what they were capable of, the men gave it their all to avoid being embarrassed by the women.

"It’s always nice to have a female around once in a while. I think the conversation changes and the atmosphere changes a bit. But I think seeing how professional Annemiek was and how she approached that camp and what she did was probably also an eye-opener for these guys who hadn’t expected her to be on that level and to be able do all that she did. For us with the men’s and women’s team it’s something that helps bring us even closer together."

Some argue that for women’s racing to evolve, it needs male riders to also voice their support. Seasoned activists will tell you that for any movement to become successful, it needs to enlist supporters from all layers of society, not just its affected base. When a champion of Mark Cavendish’s stature sends out tweets saying Marianne Vos is one of the greatest riders of all time, it changes the conversation.

"I don’t think the question is for the women to be racing with the men or to merge categories," reflects Carpenter-Phinney. "Listen, the level in women’s cycling right now is as high as it’s ever been, it’s just not seen by enough people. It’s under exposed. And it’s been put down and held down for, well, forever. But why? There’s no reason for it, because when you watch the last hour of a women’s race, it’s as exciting as the last hour of a men’s race."