August 02, 2022
We’ve seen seismic shift in attitudes towards women in sport as the Tour de France Femmes returned for the first time since the 80s and England’s Lionesses become European champions
I’m not ashamed to say that my eyes brimmed with tears as Annemiek van Vleuten crossed the finish line on the final stage of the Tour de France Femmes. To admit I couldn’t maintain composure despite being at the race in a professional sense as a journalist and that I wanted to hug every other woman in the room and say: look, we’ve done this. It’s here. We’ve started to change things.
It was a moment that is hard to explain to those who haven’t experienced years of feeling like you don’t belong while doing something that you love. Since I was ten years old, I’ve raced bikes as a woman. I did it despite my friends at school not really understanding why I was interested in competing in a traditionally boisterous sport. I did it despite knowing, even as a teenager, that it wasn’t a career path that would make me rich, perhaps even let me earn a liveable wage. I did it despite often being the only girl at club rides or training sessions. Despite rarely seeing women’s racing on TV. In my bedroom, I had a poster up of Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour de France. I looked at it as motivation to train hard everyday, despite understanding that I’d probably never get the chance to fight for a yellow jersey myself.
When I stopped racing a few years ago, I started working as a journalist, and I still felt like I didn’t really belong. When I covered Paris-Roubaix for the first time, there was only a sprinkling of female journalists there, and I couldn’t help but feel like I needed to act differently, dress differently or wear less makeup to be taken seriously in the circles I found myself in. Like I had to work harder to make sure my work was up to the highest standards, be certain that the questions I asked in press conferences were always clever and well-considered, because I knew I’d be held to a different standard as a young woman in the press room.
Last week changed everything. The cohort of journalists at the Tour de France Femmes was overwhelmingly female in an industry which has long had barriers to entry for women. For the first time, we were the majority, and it felt good. It felt like we…