Super cool women doing neat things on bikes

Yes, worth booking early--I'll try now, hope there are still tickets. I saw 'Half the Road' some years ago at Look Mum Mare Street but as little has changed, it's still going to be up-to-date enough.

I went today--a very interesting event with a Q&A that was much too short. People initially seemed shy about asking questions and (I think) would have got into gear more had it been longer. I had lots but didn't ask any as there were so many little girls and teenagers in the audience (who I assumed were probably racing) and I felt it wasn't really my place. Only one of them asked a question in the end, though.

Not only little girls; I would say the significant majority of the audience was female. This was really different from all other events of this type that I've been to--mostly they seem to be 90% (older) men. @Emilia was there, too, and asked the first audience question.

There did seem to be a kind of exasperation about the way things had gone since that documentary--I remember seeing it a couple of years ago and there was a different atmosphere; people were hopeful that things might be about to change for the better, but nothing much seems to have happened. Nicole Cooke was good and said some interesting things (e.g., she has been talking to Julie Harrington, who's now the BC CEO), but she was considerably more vague, I thought, than Emma Pooley in the film, who would probably be a much sharper institutional operator if she got the chance (or at least that's how she comes across to me). Her verdict on Thomas Dekker, who was signed by her then team for €400k (or so) when he came back from a drugs ban (and the women's team then not being funded any more) was still the best sentence of the film: 'And he was rubbish!' It again got a big laugh.

It got me wondering what a good follow-up to the film now would have to look like. Brian Cookson, who looked so bad in the film (highly discriminatory), is gone from the UCI but one would guess there are plenty of equivalents in his place now, perhaps worse ones.

My main interest in it relates to what NC said in reply to a question about lack of ethnic minorities in the sport. She called it a 'self-sustaining situation' that people don't see minority riders and then many are consequently not inspired to start (needless to say, some people may be inspired by the exact opposite, but the point is that racism clearly exists). The 'self-sustaining situation' is obviously the same in women's racing, although there the lack of visibility relates mainly to lack of TV coverage. How do you break the chicken-and-egg situation that women's cycling could be a force to change sex stereotyping, but women's cycling doesn't get anywhere because of sex stereotyping? The various examples in the film still shock even if you've seen them before--Inga Thompson telling the story of how Hein Verbruggen wanted to introduce testing whether women racers were menstruating and then banning them from racing if they were.

Overall, since 2014-15 there's been a bit of tokenism and not much else.