This stuff has been going on in cycling - in the UK, at least - at local level for years.
I did a bit of bike racing in a previous life. I didn't do any real training - ride to work and back Monday to Friday and ride up a big hill near home on Friday afternoon repeatedly until I got bored.
My results were mediocre to say the least from a man's perspective, but the times I posted in time trials were usually just ahead of the fastest women. The ones that beat me were outstanding, national level riders... Or trannies.
The strange thing was that none of them really even seemed to make an effort to look feminine. One in particular looked like Noddy Holder.
I can't see trans 'women' as female. To me, they've got male bodies and no amount of hormones or surgery will make anything more than a superficial, cosmetic difference.
Anyway, cycling isn't the sport it used to be, at least in this country. I used to love reading the stories of the old-timers in magazines such as Procycling and the Comic (Cycling Weekly in the UK).
Eugene Christophe once walked six miles to a blacksmiths when his frame snapped in an early Tour de France and fixed it himself because the rules didn't allow outside mechanical interference. He was still penalised because the blacksmith's apprentice worked the bellows while he hammered his bike back into one piece:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8n...t_incident
Quote:Quote:
Christophe said:
I plunged full speed towards the valley. According to Henri Desgrange's calculation,[3] I was then heading the general classification with a lead of 18 minutes. So, I was going full speed. All of a sudden, about ten kilometres from Ste-Marie-de-Campan down in the valley, I feel that something is wrong with my handlebars. I cannot steer my bike any more. I pull on my brakes and I stop. I see my forks are broken. Well, I tell you now that my forks were broken but I wouldn't say it at the time because it was bad publicity for my sponsor.:
In 1975, Eddy Merckx finished the same race after being punched in the kidneys by a spectator and suffering a broken jaw which stopped him eating solid food:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/sports/...399464.php
Quote:Quote:
[Merckx] was closing quickly when a deranged French fan jumped from the roadside and landed a roundhouse right to his kidney.
Merckx ultimately lost less than a minute on the day, but the blow had him breathing with difficulty when he summited.
[...]
Later it was determined that Merckx had been weakened by blood-thinning medication given to him to treat the bruised kidney. And things went from bad to worse when a start-line collision two days later left him with a broken jaw. But, Merckx being Merckx, he had his medical staff wire his mouth shut that evening and he rode the remaining 550 miles on a liquid diet.
Why? He didn't want Thévenet's victory to be tainted in any way by his not being in on the chase. And he still finished second, less than three minutes behind.
And modern cycling has its own superstar, Jess Varnish:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Varnish
Quote:Quote:
In a subsequent interview with the Daily Mail, Varnish made allegations that Sutton had made sexist comments when discussing the non-renewal of her contract. In April 2016 Sutton was suspended by British Cycling, and he immediate resigned rather than mounting a defence.
Incidentally, the greatest British cyclist ever (at least until recent times), Robert Millar, has gone the same way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippa_York
Quote:Quote:
As Millar, York married a French woman, Sylvie Transler, in December 1985. No-one from York's family was in attendance, nor were any of her team-mates, who had no idea she even had a girlfriend. Panasonic team-mate Phil Anderson commented, "He didn't seem to have the skills for getting on with men, let alone women".[27] The couple were believed to have separated by the late 1990s.
I never thought that I would tire of sport. Sad, isn't it?