Phillipa york in the guardian

Sorry, but Sean Kelly droning on puts me straight to sleep, he just repeats the question he's been asked in that monotonous voice and adds virtually nothing else of any interest. The combination of him and Rob Hatch is unbearable.

Well what a surprise there eh

He's great! Brian Smith and Marty McCrossan are also excellent. I also have a soft spot for Sean Kelley, who is often very insightful despite not saying very much.

York is terrible commentating on the women's races. He doesn't seem to have bothered to learn who the riders are or anything about them.

In terms of in-race commentary I don’t think you can beat Adam Blythe, although his dress sense is a bit niche.

He is an awkward tv presence but his actual observations on race tactics are astute, and his writings are excellent, tbf.

David Millar is a very good commentator.

Fair enough, just checking! I'm no cycling expert, just didn't see a mention of commentary work on his wiki page.

No, I know who I meant - Robert Millar (Philippa Yorke), who has commentated for Eurosport in the past.

Are you getting confused? David Millar is the commentator, York is Robert Millar.

Quite an odd coincidence that two of the most successful Scottish Road cyclists of all time were both around at almost the same time and shared a surname.

The only reason Millar was able to have a professional cycling career in the 1980s was because he is male. There simply was no professional tour for women then. What a disingenuous, larping, creepy misogynist he is. He's a rubbish commentator too.

Aaargh so sorry - I got Millar mixed up with the other Lady of the Day, Jamie Wallis esq MP who’s in court for harassing his wife.

He looks horribly ill, unnervingly like Heath Ledger’s Joker on the rampage as a nurse.

In all decency, I think we should probably stop this.

He might read it and threaten self-harm; arms already got oozing lesions. Whatever the guy’s up to, we know he’s still a suffering man even tho he might not.

Top be fair I think the wiki article was consistent in miss-sexing him, whereas the people quoted back when he was racing as the man he is used correct sex ones. He does seem to have had a lot of issues for a long time

@tobee yes that times article was so difficult to read as the writer kept changing the pronouns, very confusing and I hope the book is a flop.

@JamieCannister again flip flopping pronouns.
I wonder if this obsfucation is deliberate propaganda: confuse to distract from the total absurdity of transgenderism and then hope we are all too kind, polite and uncomfortable to call it out.

we all need to stop lying to these people and to stick to their sex pronouns.

surely if his life as a man was so wrong for him them all his achievements reached as Robert should not be remembered? Are we repeatedly told not to dead name?
David Walsh the sports writer peddling this book, is exploiting this man to an extent.

clearly Robert has had problems throughout his life:
the drug doping, bad temperedness and hostility towards the rest of his sports team and others.

Uncle Bobby from Men’s Rights Lobby makes no sense.

You don’t say.

Cut and Pasted from (trans biased) wikipedia. Posted without comment, but my bold. Apologies for the miss-sexing.

York married a French woman, Sylvie Transler, in December 1985. No one from York's family was in attendance, nor any team-mates, who had no idea York even had a girlfriend. Panasonic team-mate Phil Anderson commented that she, "didn't seem to have the skills for getting on with men, let alone women". The couple were believed to have separated by the late 1990s.

As a cyclist, York had a reputation for being taciturn and could be uncooperative with the media. Jeff Connor, author of Wide Eyed & Legless: Inside the Tour de France was told to "fuck off" when requesting an interview during the 1987 Tour de France. When told this, commentator Phil Liggett replied, "That sounds like Millar, he's been really awkward with us in the past. Personally, I think it's a disgrace. He has a duty to his sponsor to represent the team and you don't do that by telling journalists to 'fuck off'." During commentary for Stage 23 of the 1987 Tour de France, Liggett stated "[It has been a] very disappointing Tour for Robert. He has lost a lot of popularity, too, one has to say. He won't speak to journalists and the team itself [Panasonic] is also becoming discontented with Robert this year." York subsequently left Panasonic at the end of the 1987 season, to join Fagor.

And yet another post where we should have a (non-ironic) laughing reaction to give you. Made me chuckle, anyway so…

😂😎

Well the thing is no one can tell - sex is just so nebulous.

Did he just not notice he wasn't competing against any women? He must have noticed. Surely?

I think Philippa is confused. Robert Millar was small and slight, and being smaller gives cyclists an advantage on mountain stages in a bike race. (Kudos to him, he was the first Briton to win a Tour de France jersey.) Bigger cyclists have advantages in other aspects, but being smaller in road cycling is an advantage in the power to weight ratio.

A small man will still have a physical advantage over a woman though. If you compare the bodies of male and female road race cyclists you can see how differently the training affects them - the men are leaner and the women get much bulkier in the hips and thighs. The men have longer legs too and still have a far higher power to weight ratio.

Just another entitled man who when he ran out of milage in his sports career finally gave in to his fetish. He asks in the article "‘What kind of woman am I going to be?’ The correct answer is that he is no kind of woman, he is a trans identifying male who has had body modification surgery and takes cross sex hormones. He is a father ffs, he's a man! He wants to do all that then fine but there is no way he should be competing in women's sports, or using women's spaces or claiming to represent us in anyway, he does not. I also get that older AGP men feel that transing children somehow legitimises them but he has not place weighing in on the treatment of children.

Its always the same old script with these guys isn't it?

@GallantKumquat that is interesting, thank you.

I agree this is a dangerous train of reasoning.

1. Even if men had no physical advantage whatsoever and that could be proved, why shouldn't women have their own single-sex sports?

2. Sports performance is highly complex and all factors that go into it will never be quantitatively accounted for, so it will never be possible to make the claim: because sport X doesn't depend on sex differentiated attributes W, Y, Z, men have no advantage. This is in fact is the dishonest argument TAs are constantly using. Once a particular formulation of it is shown to be false, the goalpost is moved. Trying to reason in this manner grants a false premise, unless it's carefully disclaimed.

3. In actual fact, there is a large disparity in outcomes of jockeys of different sexes. In the US approximately 14% of professional jockeys are female, but at the very top tier, the proportion is much lower, e.g. in the Kentucky Derby there have apparently been no female jockeys in the last 10 years. This could be explained in ways that doesn't depend on males' physical advantage, but the most straightforward way to explain it is that, like marathon running, the physical conditioning difference between male and female enthusiasts allows for a degree of overlap in performance, but at elite levels of training men in their prime age categories are so much faster than women, that their times are totally dominant.

But even in equestrian events , where the horse is doing much of the heavy lifting, men still have an advantage in events when strength is needed, even when they are light bodied men whose outward physical build is on the smaller side. Think how many jump jockeys are male rather than female, that post pubertal muscle strength has a lot to answer for.

No, I wasn't very clear - the fact that men and women compete on an equal footing in horsey events was what made me say almost all sports so I shouldn't have left room for doubt as to what I meant by 'riding'.