‘You Can 100% Focus on Cycling Now.’ Elisa Longo Borghini on the State of Women’s Cycling
The Italian national road race champion joins the Bobby & Jens podcast this week.
By WILL TRACY
ot long ago, to be professional cyclists, most women had to simultaneously take on second careers.
Luckily, things have changed considerably in just a handful of years.
“It’s a bit a sign of the times,” says Italian national road race champion Elisa Longo Borghini on the latest episode of the Bobby & Jens podcast.
“Most of the time in the past, you had to have a second career, because you didn’t have minimum salary, maternity leave, and so on. So you had to create your own second chance if you couldn’t be the best in cycling.”
Thanks to those developments and guarantees for athletes in the top level of cycling, they can now focus solely on one job.
“Right now, with the minimum salary and everything being settled, you can 100 percent focus on cycling,” Longo Borghini says.
That’s had a direct impact on the quality of racing.
With the ever increasing quality of competition and professionalization of the sport, training now takes up most of the remaining time for female cyclists, as it does for men in the sport’s top levels.
“In between races we are always a bit busy,” Longo Borghini says.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
