#NoPodiumGirls: What We’ve Learned
We took a lot of flack this week for a careless error on social media. We posted a story—“The Weirdest Trophies in Cycling”—on Facebook with the caption, “Which one of these trophies would you want to win?” The corresponding photo of a “podium girl” next to the Giro d'Italia’s Never-Ending Trophy made it appear we were inviting our audience to choose between the trophy and the woman holding it—and not, as intended, the various trophies in the slideshow. Some of our readers responded accordingly, with jokes or crude comments. Others were infuriated by the sexist juxtaposition.
But what all of these responses really highlighted is the sensitive subject of podium girls—and how frustrated many of us are with images of women in cycling being often reduced to trophy holders. There’s a reason these photos draw such a reaction. In a sport where pro women are excluded from the biggest event of the year, a photo of Tour de France winner Chris Froome sharing the podium with models in tight dresses becomes a stark symbol of ongoing inequalities.
That’s how the #NoPodiumGirls movement got started. First came the Twitter hashtag, triggered by the usual sexualized images from the season’s Grand Tours. Then the web magazine Pretty Damned Fast ran a piece called “#NoPodiumGirls,” written by Zoë Leverant and with an introduction from site co-founder Anna Maria Diaz-Balart, on how gender disparity in bike racing makes objectified images of podium girls all the more infuriating.
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“I got really upset because I got kicked off another magazine’s social media feed for just saying, ‘I love it when you guys stick to race coverage instead of podium girl pictures,’—and that got me booted out of the community!” Diaz-Balart says. “So we were feeling a little exasperated by not being able to express our opinions in other outlets and decided it was time to have more than a hashtag but a long-form piece that really touched on a lot of the issues tied up in the whole podium girl spectacle.”
The post, which calls for an end to the tradition, immediately went viral—generating a lot of interesting commentary on Reddit and Twitter. Diaz-Balart said she even saw the conversation cross over into other sports where professional female athletes are less visible than podium girls, like motorsports. And while the authors clarified that they weren’t attacking the women who occupy those objectified roles, they addressed the whole system that elevates them.
Leverant writes:
So few podiums being available to women isn’t a coincidence – it’s written directly into the rules. UCI regulations specifically limit the duration of women’s stage races to 6 days when men’s can run for up to 23; restrict the average length of a stage to 100km in comparison to men’s 140km; cap the length of a one-day race at 140km when men get 280km; and, most gallingly, require a minimum yearly salary for men but not for women. Male and female bodies are different, but not so much that women should be denied half the opportunities afforded to men and guaranteed no income for their work. Add podium girls and the message is clear: your bodies are too weak for cycling, but if you’d just show us a little more of them, we’d pay attention.
Diaz-Balart says she braced herself for backlash against the post, but most of the feedback has been overwhelmingly supportive. The #nopodiumgirls hashtag took off in a way it hadn’t since its first use on Twitter in 2013—clearly it resonated with cycling fans of both sexes.
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“We had no idea how well it would be received—just the commentary on our site alone was amazing,” Diaz-Balart says. “People were talking about their own personal experiences, about raising daughters that are cyclists, about being proactive, about starting petitions, about suggesting things to race promoters—just overwhelmingly positive and constructive and heartwarming feedback. People in cycling were asking themselves, ‘What does it mean to have podium girls, and what message does that send, and what are the best ways to achieve gender parity in cycling?’”
Diaz-Balart says she hopes the essay and hashtag prompts cyclists to think more about the issue. People are already taking action, putting pressure on local promoters and race directors to include more podiums for racers—and fewer “podium girls” to adorn them. There’s even a #nopodiumgirls petition underway.
“There’s great power from having this organic, inside-the-community push,” she says. “If we brought the issue to people’s minds, and people are reflecting on that, that’s great.”
Which brings us back to our social media gaffe: It’s frustrating to be called out over an easily misinterpreted image when we at BICYCLING put a lot of stock in gender equality—both in our coverage and the even ratio of our staff. But as members of the media, we understand why people were upset with us. We influence the future of cycling—and young girls just getting into the sport—and have a responsibility to show images of women as athletes and not sexualized accessories. There are a lot of “traditions” that don’t need to continue unquestioned.
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