Dtbe-@aol.com
Candice,
I have been following your petition and the responses, too to increase the amount of women in the sport of cycling. Your premise that states. "create it and they will follow" has been tryed, and ended up not working as well as it should.
Last year on the mtn. bike side we created the series and ran identical catagories for both the men and the women, with one modification after the series began. The modification was to combine the pro women or woman as the case ended up being (i.e. Jessica Cortell) with the Expert women. It was done to create some competition and share in the rewards for all the Pro/Ex women.
But in the other catagories, we provided an identical series for both the men and the women, and we had substaintally less numbers with the women fields through out than the mens fields. When compared one to one. However, the numbers of competitors in the womens fields were up more than in the past and we achieved our goal of getting more men and women involved in the sport of cycling. By that token the series was a great success. In 2000 it is my understanding that the numbers are increasing even more, which is great. The series was concieved with increasing dwindling numbers of competitors and creating unity among promoters as a couple of the primary goals.
I would like to inform you though that in the some of the older womens catagories we ran all year with absolutely no competitors in some of the fields. We did this at a substaintal loss and if I were to do it again in the future I would combine some of the catagories, to run a more fiscally sound series.
Contrary to what most people think, the profit margin in promoting is extremely narrow and the energy needs to be placed in areas where a promoter can insure the success of his/her event and the continued livehood of such event. I feel that be attempting to legislate how a promoter should run the catagories of a event is going to be counter productive and cause a lot of negative feelings from the competitors and the promoters. I can see that you are frustrated, or else you would not be pushing as adamately as you are to make this happen.
I would like to challenge you to get involved on the promotional side and adminstrative side of cycling before you make a strong push for this, so you can gain a better understanding of the promoters perspective. We all and I mean we all would like to see numbers increase in all venues of cycling, but by mandating someone do something that they're not doing to make a living at is just going to discourage present and future promoters. We need to foster and get more people out putting on races, we need to get better sponsorship $'s to be able to reach potiential untapped competitors to come out and race. We need to make this happen in the most positive and fun manner we can. After all this is supposed to be about something good, healthy, and fun. No more.
I feel that I have contributed enough to be entitled to make this observation and I would not be happy to say the least to have someone legislating to me how to promote my races, create my catagories, and so on. It's done by what is going to get the most people out to race, and to at minimum not loose any $'s. I don't know if you realize what the cost's involved would be to run empty or minimal catagories, on the road side or the mtn. bike side.
Cheers,
David Beede