Well it’s over. The London Cycling Challenge, that is. And I have just presented our own school prizes to those children on our team who cycled the most miles. Including a child in the reception class who cycled over 50 miles in those four weeks. Not bad for a four year old!
It also looks like we have won our school category as well. My only regret as I presented our little prizes was that so few girls joined our team. Only three. And I began to think that much of the attempts by various organisations to get women cycling (Cycletta, the Breeze initiative and so on) could be approaching the problem from the wrong end, age wise. I spent a lot of time chatting to parents about cycling with their children in my attempts to recruit members to our team and it became apparent that a significant number didn’t really think of cycling as something their girls would enjoy or like. Yet conversations with the girls themselves often produced a different viewpoint. There seems to be a mismatch in some families with how their parents want their girls to dress and behave and what those girls might choose for themselves, when very young. However, the older the girls I talked to, the less likely they were to say they would love to ride a bike if they had one. I guess that’s how stereotyping and conditioning works.
Looks like we need to catch them young.