If you didn’t know, the guys from Cannondale Factory Racing will be riding these in 2013… I mean Enve wheels of course.
We have a sexism problem in cycling, and here you see Exhibit A - selling women (or rather, dehumanized parts of women’s bodies) as sexual objects alongside the mechanical objects meant to make a bicycle move. The message is clear: the place of women in cycling is to provide objects for male cyclists to gaze upon, not to pursue their own desire for competition, exercise and/or fun free from harassment and objectification. This is amplified by the frankly gross caption accompanying the photo. I do not know who produced the photo; it is irrelevant, as it is but a single example of a larger problem.
This is not an academic discussion, the consequences for women athletes are real. National federations are refusing to send qualified women riders to the World Cyclocross Championship on the grounds that they cannot afford to - even though some of these athletes have offered to pay their own way. This can only be seen as a tacit acknowledgement by these federations that they do not take women’s racing seriously enough to be worth spending money on - these nations are, after all, sending full men’s squads.
This all needs to end: the sale of women’s bodies as accessories to bicycle parts and bicycle races, the failure of national federations and the UCI to properly develop and grow women’s professional racing. There is at least one small thing you can do: here’s a petition telling the UCI to enact the same rule requiring that national federations send their top 3 male riders to the World Championships for women riders as well. Please sign it. UCI Cyclocross Commission: Include each nation’s top 3 ranked women riders in World Championship.
(Source: facebook.com, via spookybikes)
