Over the weekend, Debora Silvestri (Laboral Kutxa – Fundación) suffered a horrific crash at Milan–San Remo Donne.
It happened, as these things so often do, in a place that invites chaos: the descent off the Cipressa, a road full of blind corners where riders push the limits of speed and control. Brake a fraction too late, touch a wheel, hesitate for half a second. It doesn’t take much for a courageous performance to turn into a disastrous one.
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It was a horrible crash. Probably the worst I can recall watching live since Annemiek van Vleuten’s fall at the Rio Olympics in 2016. But it was not an unusual one.
Crashes are an unfortunate but entirely ordinary part of cycling. More often than not, riders pick themselves up and carry on, bloodied, bruised, torn kit and all. As Kim Le Court, one of the riders caught up in the crash, put it succinctly: “That’s bike racing.” Not women’s bike racing. Bike racing. Full stop.
Yet only one of those crashes seemed to invite a broader discussion about who belongs on a bike. In men’s racing, crashes are framed as risk, positioning, bad luck and the inevitable consequence of racing on the limit. Yet Silvestri’s crash became something else entirely once it left the broadcast and entered the comment sections.
“To[o] busy thinking about the kitchen.”
We’ve seen these before. And we will see them again. The comments are unimaginative, repetitive and, often, barely literate. They hardly seem worth engaging with. And yet they are common enough that there is, in fact, research on exactly this pattern.
Studies of sports media and audience perception show that women athletes are more likely to be framed in terms of inherent ability or, rather, limitations, while men’s performances are contextualised through tactics, conditions or circumstances. In other words, when a man crashes, it’s the race; when a woman crashes, it becomes something about women.
There is no meaningful evidence that women’s cycling is more crash-prone than men’s. The variables are the same: speed, proximity, terrain, risk. The outcomes are the same, too. Silvestri broke five ribs and suffered a minor shoulder fracture in that fall.
That is the story. Not some discussion on women’s bike handling. Not a cautionary tale about participation. Just a rider who hit the deck in a race that has been knocking riders off their bikes for more than a century.
