It's Not All Podium Kisses
by Jen See on Aug 16, 2010 6:26 PM EDT
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The Tour of Britain is looking for podium girls, and the Guardian and Jezebel are here to tell you that it's bad news. Jezebel calls the tradition "patronizing," while the Guardian is miffed at the low payment £50 per day and the responsibility of "kissing the sweaty cheek" of the day's winner. Eeeew, cooties.
All this would seem to be your usual feminist hand-wringing over beautiful women standing around, well, looking beautiful. Somewhere along the line, though, the Guardian got the idea that podium hostesses are cyclists:
What is crushingly depressing is that the hostesses (known widely as podium girls and festishised all over the internet) tend to be top cyclists themselves.
Say what? If any of the women wearing the the polka dot umbrella skirts at the Tour de France had ever raced a bike, I would be massively surprised. Like, fall off my couch suprised. The podium hostesses are nearly always models or aspiring models. I've yet to see a bike racer, though there's always a first.
To be sure, the Guardian raises a good point. The Tour of Britain, like many of the big pro men's races, does not include a women's race. It should. The British women, including Nicole Cooke, Lizzie Armitstead, Emma Pooley, well, they're seriously fast. Certainly, they deserve a high level race in their home country.
But criticizing the podium presentation is beside the point. It's not like Nicole Cooke is going to apply to present jerseys at the Tour of Britain. She's like busy, you know, racing her bike. That women riders actually have their own races seems to have escaped the Guardian writer. I guess we should thank her for trying, at least.
Me, I love me some women's athletics and I've spent a good portion of my life competing in one way or another. Oh Title IX, how I heart you. I've never had the ambition to be a podium girl. But the practice doesn't exactly get my shammies in a twist. Actually, I found it a bit odd that the Tour of California seemed almost apologetic about the whole thing. Khaki pants? For reals? C'mon, glam that thing up! It's California.
Every month, one of the surf magazines runs a sexy shot of a lovely woman in a bikini oppposite the colophon. Last weekend at surfing's U.S. Open, Carissa Moore took home a $50,000 check for wining the contest. Girl rips. I'm saying, there should be space for all kinds of girls. As long as Carissa Moore gets paid to rip, I don't mind the girl posing for the bikini shot.
And that's where cycling needs to step up. Where's the $50,000 for the race winner? Forget the podium girls. That's hardly worth the effort, especially since I suspect the Tour of Britain, like other races, will have plenty of applicants for the job. No, what women cyclists need is more bike races, more press about their bike races, and more money. And those things won't come from taking away the podium kisses.
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Hello Guardian?
can you remove your head form your ass long enough to print something useful?
where did this gem come from anyway? Some one smoking crack agin in the office late at night? Festishised? Really?
What is crushingly depressing is that the hostesses (known widely as podium girls and festishised all over the internet) tend to be top cyclists themselves.
Anyone who has every thought a working Photojournalist has a glam job needs to rethink...
by Christopher See on Aug 16, 2010 6:47 PM EDT reply actions
I am truly speechless
Late to the game here, apologies. But I can’t resist. I mean, could they be more wrong? Does the Guardian understand women athletes this poorly? I would think they not only are crowded out by the models whom the races prefer, but in fact they could not possibly have LESS interest in kissing up (literally) to the guys who scarf up 98% of the available money in cycling. I mean, I’m sure the men and women racers get along fine, just like in a club: parallel universes but they tend to understand and respect each other more than non-cyclists. Which would pretty much do away with the desire to kneel at the feet of the guy winners. Unreal.
"Good thing I never said out loud that I was pulling for France, before this all started." -Mark Blacknell
by Chris Fontecchio on Aug 17, 2010 4:45 PM EDT up reply actions
Category error.
The woman who wrote it is a cycling commuter. This is, essentially, a moaning about cycle paths type commuter blog with a bit of leisure-type charity fundraising London-Brighton sort of thing stuff thrown in. Let’s face it, if she thinks podium girls are mainly cyclists as opposed to – ahem – cyclists’ girlfriends & doens’t know what an ardoisier is, she isn’t going to be all that much of a cycling as sport fan.
The Guardian sports section, an entirely different animal, has bugger all interest in covering women’s cycling outside the Olympics, probably for the reasons the comments to the original Guardian article make perfectly clear.
"I was just trying to keep warm" - Ian Stannard on finishing third in KBK
hm
not everyone knows the difference between bike-riding and the athletic madness known as cycling. Annoying…
"Good thing I never said out loud that I was pulling for France, before this all started." -Mark Blacknell
by Chris Fontecchio on Aug 18, 2010 12:47 AM EDT up reply actions
Underpayment of women is not just confined to riders, I see.
£50? Bang on the minimum wage. What a life, eh.
"I was just trying to keep warm" - Ian Stannard on finishing third in KBK
Contractors aren't subject to minimum wage, at least in the US
At least not by the company hiring the contractor.
"Oh man, it’s going to take days to kill all these people!"
Thankfully this is not the US.
"I was just trying to keep warm" - Ian Stannard on finishing third in KBK
Fully agree...
…almost anything else I have to say is so far over the no politics line it’s breathtaking.
I don't think every Men's race should have a Women's race
1. The men’s sport is much larger than the women’s sport, so equality in races wouldn’t work anyways.
2. I think adding “women’s” onto the end of a male counterpart race is patronizing.
Women’s cycling may need more big races. But having a female counterpart for every major male race need not be the only answer. Just have more women’s events independent of male events.
"Oh man, it’s going to take days to kill all these people!"
How, precisely?
It’s not happening, is it? No. What’s happening is that men’s races are in fact displacing women’s races. (Canada, anyone?).
"I was just trying to keep warm" - Ian Stannard on finishing third in KBK
+1,000
I am still enraged by what happened with the Canadian races. Bloody UCI, again….
by Sarah Connolly on Aug 16, 2010 7:55 PM EDT up reply actions
The argument for joining the men's races
The argument for adding women’s races to existing men’s races is that you already have the infrastructure in place, and the women get an extra jolt of publicity from the media that are on hand to cover the men. When they run the women’s races ahead of some of the classics, more fans see the women than they otherwise would. This is good for helping gain a fan base for the women.
In Italy, the Giro Donne gets coverage right after the Tour de France stages. Not much, but some. That’s a great example of a women’s stand-alone race that works. Of course, it’s still mostly only covered in Italy and it does get overshadowed by the Tour.
Me, I think both approaches are probably ideal. But adding women’s races to high profile men’s events does seem to raise the profile of the women.
Once again
Plouay might be the optimal version, at least from a TV coverage perpective. The women race the day before the men. The broadcast infrastructure is all there so it is economically doable to transmit but it is not on the same day so that it clashes.
Yes, from an audience perspective it's superb
(as is RvV) but it will never get TV time because they can’t cover two races at once. No TV = less sponsors, less money.
A healthy balanced diet...
… Is probably the best way to go. Utilising a few key men’s races to raise awareness of women’s cycling works. The UKs National Road Race championships show the positives and negatives of this approach. There was a live feed of the men’s race in the afternoon, during that live feed they ran a half hour highlights package of the women’s race that ran in the morning. Fab! The downside is that the men’s race was all important, so when there was a horrible crash during the women’s crash which took 45 minutes to clear up the race organizers decided to half the distance to be raced by the women so not to delay the men’s race and the live feed.
There’s no Tour of Britain for women for one reason, it’s hard enough to get road closures for the men’s race. Ideally you could have some women GPs in some of the destination towns.
Rather than having a load of races that no one watches, I’d prefer to see a more concentrated effort to providing high quality races. From there you can manage the perception that it is a well managed sport and things should grow with careful nurturing.
I wouldn't want to concentrate the calendar any further than it is now
Though there are lots of things race organisers could do to make it possible for paople to watch their races. I like the Belgian Motomedia idea, which as far as I can gather seems to be a few people with motorbikes and videocameras who got themselves organised to provide race footage because it looked like a fun thing to do. They don’t compete with Sporza, but they fill in every season for a couple of dozen smaller races.
Racers need to race. If people are watching that's great but...
If you cut the number of races any further you’re seriously going to limit the number of women who can actually maintain themselves in the sport at a high level. It’s already very precarious for a lot of them.
"I was just trying to keep warm" - Ian Stannard on finishing third in KBK
Bridie's tweeted a couple of times this year
about going to race with the juniors, in a gran fondo etc. and that’s in Italy, one of the better countries.
And three more races have been cancelled this month, the Bryne GP (although perhaps going head to head with Plouay wasn’t such a good idea), the Multidigitaal Team TT and the Trofeo Nacional de Ciclismo Femenino
Good reasoning
I would like to see the UCI make a commitment to assure that all women’s World Cup races get televised. If they financed a production company to cover the races I find it impossible to think that they couldn’t get it on some of the outlets like Eurosport or Universal Sports to air it.
They do have a contract with CJ
for her to cover all the main races, and they’ve started to put a bit more race coverage up on You Tube.
Maybe
the classics is the place, as you mention. Having concurrent stage races would be a bit much. But I can only say from experience how great it was having a women’s Ronde van Vlaanderen to watch, and you can’t grab hold of a more hardcore ready-made audience than the people standing out along that route. Everyone wins (except Pozzato).
"Good thing I never said out loud that I was pulling for France, before this all started." -Mark Blacknell
by Chris Fontecchio on Aug 17, 2010 4:49 PM EDT up reply actions
'zactly. Road closure, marshals... huge cost cut to run them over at least part of the same route, a bit in advance.
Does it have to be every race? Eh, if they offered prizes at all proportionally, they’d have a strong field, and fans, within a year or two. But if it were only 50% of the races, that would still be good (and let the other 50% have the option of donating their share of prize money to the other races—that should make for a better prize pool).
We don't have ANY women's races of note in the UK
How would it be patronising to go from none to one?
And let’s face it, the women are far more successful in the UK on the women’s side than on the men’s anyway, so if we’re spending effort, we should be promoting something that Brits could win against a field of the very best
by Sarah Connolly on Aug 16, 2010 7:54 PM EDT up reply actions
The cities who host it pay for the pleasure
That’s why it’s always such an insane route
by Sarah Connolly on Aug 16, 2010 7:57 PM EDT up reply actions
RDAs have made the most contributions in recent years
I’m not sure how the race will function once they go.
"I was just trying to keep warm" - Ian Stannard on finishing third in KBK
"Patronizing" is a strange idea to me in this context.
I don’t think anyone sees women’s participation in Wimbledon or the Boston marathon as patronizing.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t have seperate women’s events as well, but as other have pointed out, it seems that the trend is in the other direction, with women’s only events disappearing instead of increasing.
yeah
this has nothing to do with principle; it’s getting the bang for the buck that women’s cycling needs. The sport itself is fine, it just needs more money to connect up with the fans.
"Good thing I never said out loud that I was pulling for France, before this all started." -Mark Blacknell
by Chris Fontecchio on Aug 17, 2010 4:50 PM EDT up reply actions
adding
what I mean is that the limiting factor is money, so if you can get the exposure by running the women and men on the same day, go for it.
"Good thing I never said out loud that I was pulling for France, before this all started." -Mark Blacknell
by Chris Fontecchio on Aug 17, 2010 4:51 PM EDT up reply actions
OK, so I know they got things wrong in the article
But the whole podium girls thing does irk me, for all sorts of reasons. What’s the point? What do they add? I mean, for all of you who like the eye candy, would it make a difference if they weren’t there?
As I just watched the WC in Vårgårda
where prizes were handed over by the dullest possible town councilmen and cycling fed officials, I have to say yes.
I agree with you.
As pleasing as it is to my lecherous eyes . . . the whole . . . allegory of the scene (to the victor goes the . . . uh . . . spoils) is more than a little annoying.
And . . . since it’s almost interbikey time . . . I’m going to start my hypocrisy alert about Pez’s daily distractions running photos of . . . umm . . . silicon-enhanced and spray-tanned caricatures from the sinclair imports party now.
actually
. the whole . . . allegory of the scene (to the victor goes the . . . uh . . . spoils) i
If the winner got to pick one of the host city’s maidens as a prize, I bet we’d get full podium presentation coverage. For sure.
Applications too
"To a New Yorker like you, a hero is some type of weird sandwich, not some nut who takes on three Tigers."
lit major ;)
The whole hero gets the girl thing, where the winning and the beautiful woman are linked and serve to reinforce his masculinity…. Sure, I can read it that way, and I can’t say I love it. It’s loaded with all sorts of old school symbolisms.
But I also think that the way to challenge traditional narratives, is to go out and do. That’s why I say, hey, it’s cool if the Surf mags want to run photos of chicks in bikinis and it’s cool if cycling has women as podium girls. I’m not going to get bent. Where I’m going to get bent is if there aren’t opportunities for women beyond the pedestal and outside the cage. And I’m going to get bent, if cycling doesn’t support women riders. Because if you see women out competing, out racing bikes, for me, it removes a great deal of the symbolic baggage of the podium presentation, and it becomes a rather more simple matter. It’s a nice-looking woman, posing for photos, and handing off the jersey, where questions about social roles are being answered in other ways and contexts.
Exactly.
And it also removes us from the tricky position of letting ourselves get dragged into the trap of making pronouncements about what women (or other women, for those who are female) should or should not do with their bodies. Because if you want to get to the roots of sexism, one fairly direct route is to follow the cultural thread which sees women’s bodies as being in need of a great deal of management by someone besides the women in question.
Which, you could argue, is exactly what happens with podium girls, n'est-ce pas?
Someone creates a role & someone inevitably steps up… they aren’t really determining what they do with their bodies themselves, I don’t think. Only in the narrowest sense, anyway.
"I was just trying to keep warm" - Ian Stannard on finishing third in KBK
Someone created a job
And i took it because otherwise i’d have to live on the street. So i drag my body in to work every day. I’d rather be a podium girl (okay, guy)
by yeehoo on Aug 17, 2010 5:30 PM EDT via mobile up reply actions
That's the flip side; but I think that it's rather easy to assume...
…that people who make different choices than we might ourselves make aren’t making any choices or aren’t thinking them through. Easy and very dangerous, because it ends up rehabilitating the very assumptions (women aren’t capable of making rational choices, etc.) that led to the restrictions that have been historically imposed on them in so many cultures.
As Gav says, if there are no other roles available, that’s a problem. But the solution to that problem is to create more roles.
Go right ahead!
I will be absent so someone has to take the mantle ;)
Official Basque Editor (anointed by Chris, 13/8/10)
But aside from the enforced heterosexual narrative
How come it’s not pretty podium boys for the women’s races? That’s logical, right? The weirdest thing this year was seeing the junior Omloop Van Borsele girls on the podium next to a junior Podium Girl – raising such weird questions about the whole thing.
I’d be much more ok with the concept if it also included guycandy presenting to the winning women, both on the track and on the road….
by Sarah Connolly on Aug 17, 2010 12:54 PM EDT up reply actions
I guess the obvious answer
is that they are not there for the winners but to create what the organisation thinks the sponsors will perceive as an attractive picture.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
which is also interesting
given the large fanbase of ladies who aren’t exactly allergic to mancandy…. !
by Sarah Connolly on Aug 17, 2010 1:12 PM EDT up reply actions
But how many of those are Sports Editors who get to choose the pictures that get printed?
At the start of this season Het Nieuwsblad (I think) went to the trouble of getting the rights to print that photo of Liz Hatch smeared in tarmac, but couldn’t be bothered at the same time to ring her up and ask “Are you looking forward to this weekend’s race.”
You know? I never thought of that.
Totally onboard for podium girls at the women’s races, too!
(what?)
~
At the Philadelphia Women’s Triathlon, they have something like podium boys – it’s four buff guys in shorts and a bowtie helping the competitors in and out of the water.
(okay, okay . . .)
yep, or question the heterosexual narrative
by sprinkling a few percent of guys among the girls, and girls among the guys. If it’s all symbolic, it should all be good, right?
It's weird not seeing podium girls
On the podium. They’re not used at any women’s races in the UK and it’s a dull affair with some random official. I don’t see why a hot guy can’t be used. Eitherway, it’s better to have some glamour up there.
It’s fine for motorsports, boxing… Even the olympics. Surely it is all part of the fun and entertainment?
"it’s better to have some glamour up there"
I think it’s arguable whether the usual ToB standard (orange-faced lasses in cheap & nasty jersey dresses) actually provides any, myself.
As for motorsport etc., personally I find the way they use women “decoratively” far more alienating than it ever is in cycling.
"I was just trying to keep warm" - Ian Stannard on finishing third in KBK
It always niggles for me, though
Solution = get someone who’s done something impressive to give away the awards – and have mixed totty to hold the stuff
by Sarah Connolly on Aug 17, 2010 1:13 PM EDT up reply actions
Adds pretty girls
Always a good thing
by yeehoo on Aug 17, 2010 5:22 PM EDT via mobile up reply actions
I got a kick out of the idea of having podium guys on occasion
so I can’t exactly sneer at all the folks who like podium girls.
In theory, you don’t need a podium at all, or a trophy, or shaking hands with the bigwigs, or a giant stuffed animal / wheel of cheese / silly local hat, either. Sometimes I watch, sometimes I tune out. I imagine it stops the riders from feeling so anticlimactic that they wake up having dreamed that the race never finished (like reliving exams after exam day—always worse when the exam was far too easy, or is that just me?)
Tour du Limousin
have Podium men. (Alas, not really.)
Badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger...
Perhaps even a Podium sheik
Badger, badger, badger, badger, badger, badger...
by TheFigurehead on Aug 17, 2010 3:21 PM EDT up reply actions
They should do this
at more races.
"Good thing I never said out loud that I was pulling for France, before this all started." -Mark Blacknell
by Chris Fontecchio on Aug 17, 2010 4:51 PM EDT up reply actions
I'd like to see Podium Girls replaced with...
The Badger, throwing people off the stage. At every podium. In the World. Ever.
I bet he attacks with a super aggressive triple kiss.
Bunch of slack-jawed faggots around here. This stuff will make you a god damned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me - Jens! Voigt, Predator (1987)
Somehow
(if their TV is any hint) I doubt Italian cycling forums and newspapers struggle with the concept of podium girls
moo
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