First among equals

Serramenti PVC Diquigiovanni–Androni Giocattoli. To the uninitiated it might sound more like the midfield spine of some legendary European Cup-winning football team from the 1960s or 1970s but it was the name under which Gianni Savio’s UCI ProTeam raced in the 2008 and 2009 seasons.

Oh, how we chuckle at “Swiss Toni” and his wheeling and dealing which has not only created some of the busiest jerseys in the men’s peloton but – more importantly – has kept his popular second division team running for the last 15 years.

This past week, I have been reminded of that particularly wordy incarnation of Savio’s squad for a couple of reasons. The first is that I’m reading Kathryn Bertine’s “Stand: A Memoir on Activism. A Manual for Progress” which, among other things, highlights the many disparities between men’s and women’s cycling, from the racing itself to the gaping gender pay chasm and attitudes in officialdom ranging from ignorance to blatant sexism. The second is Isabel Best’s CyclingNews article “Racing below the breadline: The women’s cycling omerta” which outlines the extent of the financial disparity but also tells the story of Olympic silver medallist and one-time superstar of women’s racing, Rebecca Twigg. For her there was no glorious retirement after she left the sport in 1997, no post-career development academy, lucrative media contracts or line of haut couture sportswear bearing her name. Within 2 decades of stepping off the bike, Twigg was homeless.

Any number of solutions have been bandied about as to how to redress the inequalities between the men’s and women’s sport. One of these – a minimum wage for women – was only instituted last season, almost a decade after the then UCI president Pat McQuaid declared in 2011 that women’s cycling “[hadn’t] developed enough” to justify such a wild idea. If only he’d been in some sort of position to help make that happen.

Another frequent suggestion is compelling all men’s UCI World Tour teams to run a comparable women’s team. Of the present men’s peloton, only Movistar, Jumbo-Visma, BikeExchange, DSM, Trek-Segafredo and FDJ run parallel teams for women.

To be fair to the UCI, equal prize money is on offer for both men’s and women’s World Championships (if you overlook the fact that there is no U23 category for women) but there remains huge disparity between the minimum prize pots at World Tour and other races.

To any reasonable person, mandatory and equal minimums are just common sense but, as any seasoned fan or almost any sport knows, rarely does common sense factor in decision making by The Powers That Be. Cycling’s precarious and outdated business model also lends itself to even the most common-sense idea becoming mired in – well – mire.

So what does any of this have to do with Gianni Savio? The biggest single fiscal problem in cycling is the near-total reliance of teams upon outside investment– sponsorship. A sponsor expects a return on that investment, which at its simplest means having their name on jerseys, particularly jerseys at the front of the peloton and on podiums. Their names on yellow or maybe occasionally pink jerseys is also worth paying for (no offence, Vuelta a España!). A sponsor’s investment is also - mainly – finite and based on their expected return. So demanding that teams run 2 squads means that a sponsor either doubles their investment or must be prepared to see that investment – and perhaps the return upon it - diluted.

That finiteness (finity?) of investment also applies to race organisers and their prize pots.

So is the obvious solution to simply find more sponsors? Assuming that wider problems such as the thorny issue of broadcasting rights and revenues are unlikely to be addressed any time soon, sponsorship is likely to remain the single biggest source of income for both men’s and women’s teams. The choice faced by teams is to either of find a sugar mummy or daddy who has the means to fund squads capable, say, of winning a grand tour or to find multiple investors happy to cough up and simply battle it out for stage victories.

Perhaps instead cycling as a whole needs to accept that even at the highest level jerseys may have to get a little busier for both men’s and women’s teams (careful there, Canyon-SRAM!) to sustain the sport. Instead of sneering under collective breath at the Gianni Savio approach, maybe it’s time to embrace it for the benefit of all.

But here’s a thing: despite the myriad issues it still faces, women’s cycling is on the rise, as is the demand for coverage. The standard of racing and the excitement it provides are at the very least on a par with the men’s peloton, although the comparison is hardly exact. The personalities who ride their bikes week in, week out are also, arguably, more vibrant than most of their sponsor-friendly, big-box-ticking Y-chromosomed counterparts.

As women’s cycling continues to build momentum, men’s cycling may just end up needing to look a little more lively. The sport has basked in the privilege of the simple fact that it has existed at a high level for 120 years. While it may take some radical solutions to truly address the economic and opportunity gaps that exist between each genders’ sport, the future might depend not so much on how much investors are prepared to put in to women’s cycling, but rather how much men’s cycling may be prepared to lose.