Thoughts on Women Racers and Race Promotion

Or Wetting My Hand Then Grabbing The Third Rail...

My friend Judi spends some time hatin' on promoters who don't give out equal prizes and don't give equal dignity (e.g. the same classes and billing as the men's field) to women's races.

As a promoter I would *love* to have an equal number of women's and men's classes, with equal prize lists.

As a promoter with ties to a bunch of volunteer cyclists and amateur, non-profit clubs, however, I can't do this in my races and I'm pretty sure it isn't possible in the races that I have ties to. Most grassroots (volunteer and non-profit) race promoters are in the same boat.

The reason is very simple. Amateur cycling doesn't get commercial dollars, so we rely on the contributions of the racers (race entry fees) to pay costs and to subsidize prize lists. We cannibalize our male Cat 4, Cat 3 and masters racers in order to grow the sport in the women's and juniors' classes, and to support the elites. There's a limit to how much meat you can pick of those bones. It's not about what we want to do; it's about how much money is available.

Sure, generous sponsors also support our racing habit - an inexplicable thing for which I am unbelievably grateful. But the sponsors only get you so far, and they tend to prefer to give swag rather than cash, for fairly obvious business reasons. If an amateur race can't sustain itself from entry fees, the only way to pay for the race is to soak club members with fees to help pay for other people to race. As it is, the filled classes subsidize the less filled classes - that little bit of weekly wealth transfer from M racers is bad enough. I can't imagine also telling members of a velo club that not only must they volunteer to work a race, but oh-by-the-way your membership dues are going up $50 this year because the sponsors went away but we still need to subsidize more prize lists in classes that aren't economically viable. That isn't a sustainable approach.

Let's look at some representative numbers for a road race to see how this works. This isn't particularly tied to any race, not my club's or anybody else's; but I know how much a lot of the basic services cost in Montgomery County and the surrounding areas, so it could apply to anybody's race in that area; and your local costs may be lower but the basic principles still apply.

Fixed Cost Problem
At a road race, there are fixed costs. Facility rental will be maybe $1000 for parking, water, electricity, and so on. Porta potties may be another $500. You may need 4 cops to police intersections, and another 6 or so to operate the rolling enclosure for the pack. You need a couple motor refs per race, plus three or four to manage scoring and control the refs on the road. By the time you are done, each race will have a fixed cost of around $900 - $1100, depending on how lavishly you want cops & refs to support the breakaways. It doesn't matter if 3 racers are going, or 125. It will cost that much to have the field, before you start working out a prize list and cash payouts. There are other ways to try to allocate the costs (e.g. per capita) but that doesn't make a lot of sense when you consider that cops + refs for a field will be ~$600 alone, and that opportunity cost is attached to the choice of which fields to offer.

Limited Fields Problem
In crits, particularly non-series lower level crits, you have some flexibility to add fields. You can sort of shaft the Cat 5's with a 30 minute race, cut the 35+ to 40 minutes plus one lap, start a little early and end a little late. Road races typically don't have that flexibility. On a typical 8-11 mile roadrace "lap" that we see around D.C., you can safely fit three fields on it at the same time, and I use the term "safely" guardedly. You start the classes at 9:00, 9:01 and 9:02, with the faster classes going earlier.

The problem you run into is that if the 9:00 runs as a bunch, they will hammer it at 27 MPH for nearly three hours. Toward the end, they will definitely run into the 9:02 race, particularly if a break in the 9:02 has been away for a long time and several teams are represented. The pack will slow because the real race is up the road, and the 9:00 race will essentially slam into the back of the cruising 9:02 race, having lapped it. With more fields the risk of mixing up fields and causing danger and confusion is high, and it's not nice to make the refs try to orchestrate tricky field neutralization, then pass the faster field through the slower one (and what about the break up the road while the fields are neutralized?) With roadraces running 2-3 hours, you get 3 fields in the morning around here, and 3 in the afternoon, and that's it. No more. You *can* do multiple prize lists in a given field (allowing you to sort of lump together odd fields here and there, like 55+, juniors, etc) but there is no room at all to shove in additional fields, so you need to figure out how to allocate field space, which is the scarcest of our resources.

The Subsidy
We have prize lists in the elite races because we have to have them - it's the law, per the sanctioning bodies anyhow, and because a lot of elite racers won't come out unless the payout is at least decent. The elite fields should be big enough to support their own race a little bit, but you need a bigger-than-minimum payout to draw anything near a break-even field. What is break-even? Assuming $1100 fixed costs, break even in the elites (with a $500 payout) and big trophies is 55-60 riders. It's tough to pull that unless the weather is good and there's no decent roadraces going down in the region. The break-even point for a field without cash payouts is about 35 riders, assuming $1100 fixed costs.

This creates a bit of a problem for promoters. The Cat 5 race eats up a field spot, and with a limit of 50 riders it is barely self-supporting. The M Elite and W Elite are rarely self-supporting; at best one hopes to break even. The W 3 and W 4 tend to be pretty small and late registering typically; if a roadrace manages 35 W3 and W4 starters, it's doing pretty well. Keep in mind each of those fields has a separate prizelist, if not a separate start.

So at the start of the day, the promoter knows the Cat 5 and M 1/2/3 are going to be around break-even, possibly money losers depending on prizes and payouts awarded, and the W 1/2/3 will probably lose quite a bit of money. The W 3/4 will quite possibly be a money loser, bank on that if there are separate prize lists and if they start separately with two rolling enclosures, 4 refs and so forth. Nevermind the juniors, who will get their own class and their own rolling enclosure, usually with a dozen or so racers - we just cram them in there somewhere that we believe will be a safe spot for them to race in.

To put it very simply, the promoter has to look to the remaining 2-3 field slots to subsidize everybody else's racing. Most of the time, those classes are some combination of M3 and M4, and the M 35+.

The Quandary
Does the promoter want to avoid jeopardizing the non-profit club's bank balance? If so, then the promoter will consider an M3, an M4, and an M 1/2/3/4 35+, or perhaps an M 3/4, and an M 35+ 4/5 and 35+ 1/2/3/4, or some similar combination. Those fields will fill up with riders, and their entry fees will subsidize the classes that lose money. The classes in these three fields make it possible for the promoter to hold the other classes. It's very simple math:

75 racers x $ 30 entry fee = $ 2250

The $750 or more in 'profit' realized in those sold out men's classes underwrite the other classes and cover losses that no non-profit velo club could afford to sustain over a period of years.

So how many women's fields ought we to have?

Different Solutions to the Women's Racing Problem
A lot of promoters have one women's field. It's 1/2/3/4, with separate prize lists for the 3 and 4. This is the easiest solution from a promoter's standpoint because it allows the promoters to have 3 or even 4 races that are "profit" centers, an M 1/2/3 race that maybe loses some money, and a women's *field* that breaks even at least on fixed costs. With the normal fee structure in this reagion, there's no profit to speak of in running a road race, or at best there is a very modest profit. (Why do you think that guy in Pennsylvania who runs races for profit charges $47?)

This solution, however, sucks for W 3/4 racers. Many women I have spoken to who race tell me that there is a jump between 4 and 3, and another jump between 3 and 2, and races that don't recognize this suck with riders stuck in no-man's land for up to 2.5 hours. Yuck.

My preference, if it is affordable, is to break the W 3/4 into a separate field and run it apart from the W 1/2/3, even if both fields are a money loser, providing sufficient revenue can be generated from the Men's fields to underwrite the extra class. The Cat 3/4 men and the Masters pick up the tab for my choice. Consequently, payouts in those two races (and across the board) are lower than I would like, because I don't have that nice profit center of a third race to generate extra cash flow. Yet the arrangement provides a comfortable place for entry-level women to race and that should be conducive to growing women's racing, so that's why I prefer it. It's a tough call though and causes some lost sleep for promoters and velo club management, especially in the days just before a race when the pre-registered riders list is small. You see 11 women registered for the 1/2/3, or 18 registered in the 3/4 a couple days before the race and the first impulse is to wonder why you are even bothering to offer those fields, particularly in light of the 35 men on the Cat 4 and Cat 5 waiting lists...

What's a promoter to do? Usually, suck it up. It's tough though. In our current economic atmosphere, barring great sponsorship, a promoter who splits the W 1/2/3 and W 3/4 into two separate classes likely has to either cut payouts, or raise the entry fee for everybody to $35 or $40; or some combination of cutting and raising. It's tough to swap a money-making 75 rider field for an 18 or 26 or 35 rider field.

Now please don't blow your top about this; I'm a guy who works really hard to have equal payouts for M and W 1/2/3 racers in the competitions I'm involved in; I prefer to have at least separate prize lists for three of the four women's categories. But the racer numbers are just not there to support this, so I rob from Peter to pay Pauline, and I'm being honest with you about the process. I don't like doing that but it's the cost of doing business if a promoter is trying to grow the women's fields. (Nothing would make me happier than a W 3/4 with 75 racers registered for it; it would be a lot less headaches for grassroots promoters and clubs).

Sample Spreadsheets
I use a very simple spreadsheet to mull over the question of cash payouts and fields when thinking about future races and look at comparable races, and how many racers attend in which fields. Since I'm trying to explain a complicated subject, race finances, I thought it might be informative to cut and paste numbers corresponding with the hypothetical race we're discussing, so that you see the point I'm making.

In the top table, we have a W 1/2/3 race and separate field with a W 3/4 race. The promoter gets wiped out, losing $430 on the race by splitting the fields thusly.

In contrast, the lower table shows a slate where the W 1/2/3 and W 3/4 are started at the same time, but with separate rolling enclosures cramming the fields together and maybe causing some unhappiness. This allows the inclusion elsewhere in the schedule of a M 35+ 4/5, a race that is a big profit center. Rather than losing $430, the promoter makes $1220, which can then be split up between the fields that receive cash payouts, and maybe some can be diverted into capital improvements with the non-profit club sponsoring the event, such as better road safety signs for marking the course. The difference is pretty stark.

Time Slots	Class	# of Racers	Entry Fees	Fixed Cost	Payout	Trophies / Medals	Net Profit/Loss
9:00	M 35+ 1/2/3/4	71	2250	1100	250	150	750
9:01	M 4	75	2250	1100	250	150	750
9:02	M 5	50	1500	1100	0	110	290
							0
1:00	M 1/2/3	52	1560	1100	500	150	-190
1:01	W 1/2/3	23	690	1100	500	150	-1060
1:02	W 3/4 (separate prize lists)	26	780	1100	350	300	-970
							-430
9:00	M 35+ 1/2/3/4	71	2250	1100	250	150	750
9:01	M 4	75	2250	1100	250	150	750
9:02	M 5	50	1500	1100	0	110	290
							0
1:00	M 1/2/3	52	1560	1100	500	150	-190
1:01	W 1/2/3; W 3/4 (separate prize lists)**	49	1470	1450	850	300	-1130
1:02	M 35+ 4/5	75	2250	1100	250	150	750
							1220
*M5 limited to 50 riders, no cash payout
**Added 1 cop, 1 ref to combined W race for extra rolling enclosure for 3/4

The Solution
There's no permanent fix for financial pressures, not in racing and not in real life. But the solution to the request to provide more fields and money for women racers, at least at the amateur and regional level, is to get more women racing, to fill up existing classes, which would justify adding more classes. As it is, it kind of stinks that the men are basically picking up the tab for women's racing. The money that a class of amateur racers plows into racing should come back to them. It's not just about the prize lists and swag; it's about improving the quality of races, and maybe dropping fees where the non-profit grassroots races are involved. But we do it because most of us existing racers and promoters and club managers like to see more women in racing - that's true of the women and the men I know. If we can build up large women's classes, and the careful calculation about exactly how much women's racing a promoter can afford to sponsor will go away. So will the promoter guilt over using a couple full, very hard working men's classes to underwrite *everybody* else, including the M 1/2/3.

How do we do this? I suppose you could start by getting your club to encourage women to join. It's hard to build up a critical mass of racing women, but once it's there, it's a lot easier for them to network, recruit, and build up a solid racing cadre.

The second thing is to try to ensure development of the amateur women's classes is sustainable. I don't think they have to be profitable; I do believe, however, that they have to be break even, or at least be moving toward that. It's great to have equal payouts and lots of women's classes, but you can only do that once or twice if the cost is crippling to a race or the club that holds it. Building up the women's fields means calling women you may know and encouraging them to start racing, or calling your female racer friends and dragging them out to the races when you don't see their name on the confirmed riders list. Full fields mean joy for everybody, and full fields (or at least fuller fields) means women will get expanded opportunities and growing rewards for racing.