On the face of it when a women’s U23 category was introduced for the UCI Road World Championships in Wollongong it looked like there were all of a sudden two more good opportunities for Australia to secure a coveted world title on home soil.
After all Sarah Gigante’s 11th place at the Olympic Games elite time trial made her the first among those that would be eligible for the U23 time trial title at Wollongong. Plus with the likes of Neve Bradbury, 20, repeatedly finishing either first or second on the youth classification of races like the Tour of Scandinavia, Giro d’Italia Donne and Tour de Suisse Women there was also reason to have high hopes for the road race.
Any chance Australia may have had at securing either title, however, ended when team selections for the September 18 to 25 event were announced Friday. There was not a single U23 woman on the list.
“The complication there from the UCI, and I don't have to necessarily agree with it, is that they've created the under 23 women's category within a race which kind of splits the race into two,” Australian Cycling Team Elite Road Coordinator Rory Sutherland said in a media conference following the release of the team.
Unlike the men’s U23 category, where Australia named five riders for the stand-alone event, there is no separate race or quota for women’s U23 riders. That means that any U23 woman selected comes at the expense of an elite spot, and then there is also the issue of a cohesive team goal in a race where the first rider over the line gets the elite title, but the race for the U23 jersey may play out further back in the field.
“It does complicate things when there are no more quotas. And then you're just getting to the finish line and you have to figure out, ‘okay, is this under 23 rider in front of the other one or where was this athlete'," said Sutherland. "How do you do that in a team situation? That is really complicated when you're trying to to win the race as a whole, it's like splitting your objectives within a race."
For Australia, which is going into the race with some solid prospects for the elite title among its team of seven, including Grace Brown and Alex Manly, it was hard enough narrowing down the selections of elite riders to fit within the available spaces. Experienced players Tiffany Cromwell and Rachel Neylan were among those who didn't make it onto the squad.
Even though the team announcements are just beginning to flow, Australia also isn't alone, with Team USA not having named any U23 women either. For some nations the selection of riders that will be eligible for the category was likely to occur regardless of the new title – the likely scenario for New Zealand where U23 rider Niamh Fisher-Black is also the nation's top ranked cyclist – but elsewhere competing agendas are likely to win out.
"When you look at the big picture, you want to go for everything,” said Sutherland. “But at the same time ... Does it affect the main goal of winning the elite women's road race?"
There is an obvious solution to the U23 women's category dilemmas as far as Sutherland is concerned.
“I would prefer to see it, as a lot of other people would, to have a race the same as the under 23 men,” Sutherland said. “I think that the under 23 women deserve it. I think there's enough under 23 women to be able to do that and I know that the organising committee specifically had an opportunity and wanted to do that as well.
“But at the end of the day we have to follow the UCI rules and regulations and they're the ones that put on the race. And so while it [a world title] is a step in the right direction for the under 23 women, I would really like to see it run independently from the women's race.”
Under the current UCI plan that, however, isn’t expected to happen until 2025 in Rwanda, nearly 30 years after the U23 men's race was introduced to the Road World Championships in 1996. The first women's U23 rider over the line in the combined race is set to get the title through the Road World Championships racing in Australia, Glasgow and Zurich.
