Firstly I would like to offer my apologies for not being able to attend the Cycling New Zealand AGM and Awards evening.
It is my honour to accept the Cycling New Zealand Road and Track Council’s Shona Smith Trophy for the 2018 season.
This award is for the person who has lifted the profile of women in sport over the 2018 year.
To receive this award is very humbling and is the result of so much work behind the scenes and several years working with some incredible people and sponsors.
I would first like to thank those that have made this possible.
First and foremost my wife Tammy – Really this is a joint award for us both. We run our MGHWCT and coach our athletes as a partnership working together to give the best possible program for our riders.
The parents and helpers of our team – without their support both financially and on the ground nothing we do would be possible.
Our support team of Jordan, Grant and Steffan. We are blessed to have such a great team with a shared passion and dedication to our dream who give their time freely and selflessly.
Our riders, over the last 5 years we have had an incredible group of young women in our team. Talented, driven, dedicated and passionate who share in our vision and trust in our process. At the end of the day what we do is all about moving forward a s a team and our riders have committed to this vision.
The event organisers who have supported our ‘up-start’ young team of kiwis. Without their support for womens cycling and seeing a future and investing in womens races we would be dead in the water.
Of course the support of our national body Cycling New Zealand is critical, not only for our team but women cyclists and most importantly road cyclists. We thank Cycling New Zealand for your assistance so far and listening to what we have to say. We believe this partnership needs to be nurtured and developed, exploring how we can jointly best help our women riders.
Lastly but very importantly our sponsors. What we do is impossible and without partners who share in the vision and had a common belief of women in sport. They bucked the trend, they backed a womens team when other wouldn’t and proved that women are as good as our men and could add value as least as much as their male counterparts. The times are a changing and they help start it in NZ!
So what next.
This award is a start. We have seen some progress but we still have a long way to go. We need to continue to improve what we can offer our women road cyclists. They need equality, they deserve equality and we can’t stop advocating for it and pursuing it.
A pathway is the key!
We need to reinvigorate our domestic racing, We need to gat back a strong junior racing calendar and we need to embrace racing in ALL the regions. We need diversify our local racing, we need more crits, time trials and mixed parcour races. The harder and more technical we can make our local racing the more chance of success when we go overseas.
We need to help our riders embrace competition while at the same time buy into team work.
We must offer oppurtunities, experience and exposure for our U23’s, but as in all sport we need to increase our numbers at all levels and improve our junior development, u23 development and elite rider development on the road.
We need to support racing at the highest level. We need to race UCI races, we need to race Nations cups, we need to race World championships and we need to fight for our women road riders to gain sports at Commonwealth and Olympic games. The playing field is not equal, partly due to funding but mostly due to attitude. We need to adopt a can do attitude and believe that we can be the best in the world.
We need to explore and create connections with professional teams and leverage these contacts to create oppurtunities for our riders to move into professional teams.
Ultimately we need to ask why can’t we have a NZ based UCI world team in the future. There is no reason why not?
So thanks once again for this award an for recognising how important it is to continue to build womens cycling in NZ.
