The culture wars have arrived at Strava.
There is now a whole genre of Twitter trolling devoted to complaining about how trans women are topping some Strava Leaderboard or other in the Women category. Strava, I will remind you, is an exercise tracking service. It is not, to my knowledge, a promoter of regulated competitions. The cycling Leaderboards, in particular, are not billed as bike races. They are generated for segments, which any idiot can map out on their favorite ride for any section they want.
There is a lot of wild talk on the Twitter about “stealing” Leaderboard positions.
I don’t get it. There is nothing of value here that can be “stolen”, IMO. If there is something it sure falls well short of the value conferred by an organized bike race. And, much like said organized bike races, it is absolutely idiotic to cry about cheating or stealing when you are operating within the rules. Apparently Strava has indicated that it has no interest in policing the dangly bits of people who identify as Women or Men on their service. So, it is within the rules for anyone who identifies as a woman to do so for the purposes of their Strava tracking.
I may have engaged in a little light FWDAOTI.
At one point I was informed that I just didn’t understand because I had no experience with competitive athletics and no experience as the parent of a daughter in competitive athletics. Both of these assertions are hilariously off base.
I would argue that it is the very fact that I have engaged in competitive athletics, and parented a daughter in competitive athletics, that gives me something called…perspective.
Amateur cycling competitions, in my experience that now stretches across four decades, take place within a set of rules. These rules vary a little or a lot across various types of competition and across time. I have some thoughts about those rules and about how they may be enforced. I have some thoughts on what it means to compete against other individuals who may have advantages or disadvantages compared with yourself. The true value is learning that any person will be advantaged under some rules and disadvantaged under other rules. This is particularly the case in cycling. Also see the myriad of so called unspoken rules, aka evolved culture.
The rules vary and whining about how you are disadvantaged under the operating rules is stupid. At the very least you are free to seek some other competition venue where you like the rules a bit better.
Tl;dr: Get a grip!
In longer form, here are just a few of the ways some might be advantaged over others in cycling, drawing heavily on personal experience.
Age groupings. As a junior racer, I often competed in divisions of teen ages. Up to 14, 15-16, 17-18… that sort of thing. One of the reasons is that we recognize that as humans develop from children into adulthood, their bodies are capable of more. And that it is not particularly fun for a child to be competing against an adult. From either perspective. Anyone who knows anything realizes that kids that haven’t hit puberty yet might be competing against kids that are in various stages of growing into their adult body. Do we bang on about how it is unfair for a developed 16 year old to be competing against a 15 year old who is still physically a child? No. We recognize that there is going to be some variability.
Talent and genetics. Apart from certain delusional types we all recognize that there is such a thing as genetic endowment that makes one individual better than another at a particular sporting competition. (Ok from the perspective of a parent, maybe this is a lesson that many should have learned, but did not.) Maybe the cyclists you compete against are endowed with a body that doesn’t put on body fat. Maybe they are endowed with a ginormous VO2 max. Maybe their muscle composition responds particularly well to cycling training. Maybe their hematocrit is naturally at the higher end. It would sound insane to go on and on about how it wasn’t fair that such a person “stole” your race win, right?
Support. Suppose, as an amateur teen or young adult athlete, you were sent for a nine month training camp at high altitude. Lots of training companions, structured workouts, some races and coaching from people who knew a lot more than you did. And then after this extended training camp, you came back to sea level to compete with the cyclists that you’d raced with before. And for once, instead of being good for a top-10 or top-15 placing, you were all of sudden dicing for the wins with your generous endowment of red blood cells. Is it fair that you had these advantages when maybe the other racers in your amateur Cat IV circles couldn’t afford such things? Is it fair now if some rando resident of Colorado comes to your location and pushes you one spot down your favorite Leaderboard?
Collegiate cycling. I hit college cycling early on, when it was basically still a club sport but was growing rapidly. I attended a 1,900 student College, but our league included Division I sports institutions such as the University of Colorado, the Air Force Academy and Colorado State University. Once Nationals were organized, our team was up against the nation’s Universities of all sizes. On the scope of College athletics, this is not fair. Larger schools are in one set of competitions for most sports, and tiny schools are in another. Schools which spend a lot of money on scholarships are not competing with those that do not. But..cycling was not developed enough for this stratification of competition to make any sense. So we lived with the rules of the game. It got even worse. Eligibility was not enforced and we knew several CU Boulder racers were Master’s students. There’s a pretty good gap to be expected between 18 year old and 24 year old cyclists. I remember grumbling about how that wasn’t fair but ultimately, those were the operative rules.
Support II. Cycling is an equipment sport. We exist at present in the marginal gains aero era, in which tremendous differences in performance are associated with many modern bike technologies, designs and features. Which cost money. Do we patrol Leaderboards to keep off any wealthy person who can afford the $12,000-$18,000 for the latest and greatest in slippery bicycles, wheels, tires, socks, helmets and all the rest? Should someone who can afford an actual time-trial bike be allowed to steal my leaderboard position on my local flat segment?
Mountain bike class. The exponential development of mountain bike racing in the early 1990s was guided in part by a desire to be more friendly to noobs than road cycling was perceived to be. In one area, the classification of riders by skill/experience was not regulated. In road racing, you started in the lowest class (Category IV at the time) and had to petition your state level USCF rep to be moved up to a higher racing class. I think they had the authority to move someone up a class if they were just beating the pants off their current class. In contrast MTB racing was entirely self-selected with no real control over selecting Beginner vs Sport vs Expert. In those days a road race Cat III would be at the top of any Beginner MTB race and they often seemed like sand-baggers. Even if they had barely any experience on a mountain bike. Riders could go to different races and register in Sport for one and Beginner for another. There were sometimes race series put on by one promoter with series long points competitions. This would actually discourage riders who were blowing away the Beginner or Sport classes from moving up to the next class within a single season. Then they came up with the Clydesdale weight category. Over 200 pounds was typical. No, there was no weigh in. And was a lean 6’4” guy who weighed in at 200.5 before his morning bm fairly racing against more schlubby dad bod types?
Gravel racing, mass starts. The largest gravel races right up to the pro level are, or were until very recently, mass start events. This meant that if a top level woman in a particular category was able to hang with a group of men, they got all the advantages of that pack. Over, say, a woman in their own class that missed that break and rode the whole way essentially solo. Or with a pack of lesser men. Is that fair? Of course it was, well within the rules.
Doping: Sometimes, there will be cheating. In amateur cycling there is very little doping control. And yes, we’ve seen incidents where amateurs have been busted, so some nonzero number of athletes are doing it. Did this happen during my college days? Probably? Now, in my dotage, are my 50-something age groups being led by dudes with doctors who help them max out their testosterone levels? Probably? On Strava leaderboards? How on earth is that going to be regulated? Do they even address it? One thinks not. Getting all worked up about the possibility a doper might have “stolen” your Leaderboard position is just comical.
One of the tremendous benefits of competitive athletics is, in my view, the well..competition. The idea that someone might be better than you are. That you might be better than they are. And that there is no guarantee this is going to somehow be even steven or 50-50 in outcome. You may love your sport very much but you may not be as good at it as your ego tells you that you should be. You may even throw hours and hours of training into it and still come up short.
There is only one thing in your control and that is training yourself to better than you were.
In conclusion, there is just no legitimacy to people shouting on the internet about how it isn’t fair that trans women are appearing on leaderboards for Strava segments. These people just don’t seem to understand that in competition there are arbitrary rules and categories for any particular thing. In this case, Strava is not going to police gender. If you don’t like it, fine, don’t compete under those rules. But don’t expect to be able to arrange every competition you want to enter to your own specific benefit.
Sun Dappled Forest 