Canterbury women first to enter tough race

Press, 12 October 1988, Page 68

Canterbury women first to enter tough race

From

MALCOLM CONDIE

in Invercargill

For the first time since the inception of the Rothmans Tour of Southland cycling race the field will contain women riders.

Canterbury’s Katrina Stewart and Sally Fraser have entered the tour, which starts tomorrow. After four days of racing,

if they finish, they will have completed 672 km of cycling and almost circumnavigated Southland.

The race has always been open to women, but the Canterbury competitors are the first to take up the challenge. “Basically we’re mad,” Stewart and Fraser agreed when asked why they had entered the gruelling event.

Seriously though, they have different reasons for wanting to put themselves through the pain of tour cycling. “I want to keep building my confidence to race overseas tours like the Rothmans,” Fraser said. “I have raced overseas for the last seven months and am just getting that confidence.”

“It is important to gain experience with strong scratch riders,” Stewart said. “The biggest scratch field I have ever encountered was 10 women. “Women’s cycling in New Zealand just does not offer the big tours women need to be recognised internationally.” Fraser, the 1987 national women’s road

cycling champion, has been racing in the United States and Europe since March and has had a taste of tough tours. “The East German women competing in the Giro d’ltalia are so butch and strong; racing over there was really hard,” she said. Stewart intends to travel to the United States next year and per-

form on a similar circuit as Fraser did this year. Their intentions in the Southland tour are to finish, and to have a good time. “Women are better built for endurance sports than men, so we’ve probably got just as good a chance of finishing as many of the B grade riders,” Stewart said.

Both Fraser and Stewart will be riding with the B graders. They are only two of the 64-strong field — the biggest entry in a tour of Southland — and will be easily recognised. Both will have motifs bearing the message “Hell on wheels” sewn to the back of their cycling shorts.

Reaction to their participation has been mixed, but on the whole favourable. Looking at a pair of women’s legs is always a change during a hard race, a Canterbury male competitor said. “That also goes for all the shaven male legs we will be able to look at,” Stewart replied.