We’re about to start the 2016 Road Season, so it’s time to re-launch the Unofficial Unsanctioned Women’s UCI Social Media Jersey!
Back in 2012, Dan and I ran the Social Media Jersey competition, to celebrate riders from the women’s peloton who helped us enjoyment of the sport. Thanks to our amazing readers, we raised over US $3,500, which was sent as prizes to 11 riders who were voted the winners by so many fantastic readers. We had a lot of fun, and ever since then we’ve been talking about doing it again, in a different form.
The Social Media Jersey does what the name suggests, giving us the chance to share content from professional women cyclists that we’ve loved, and to reward riders and teams for making following the sport so much more fun.
How it will work
This time we’re running the competition over 7 months, and a grand end-of-season prize. We’re not raising money or giving out cash prizes this time (unless we change out minds, for that final season prize) – instead we’ll use money from Sarah’s Patreon to make a T Shirt or certificate for each of the winners.
Throughout each racing-month*, anyone can nominate social media they’ve enjoyed from and women riders, teams and races. These can be blogs, videos, tweets, instagram, and any other social media that is available publicly and you don’t have to sign up to see. This media can be on team accounts, but DOESN’T include any content that’s published exclusively on or by a professional media organisation, as we believe the riders should be being paid for that, and they should have been helped by professional editors. So, for example, a blog on a rider’s website counts, even if it’s cross-posted elsewhere, but a rider diary produced by a media website isn’t; and a video on a rider’s own YouTube or Vimeo can be nominated, but not if it’s published by a media organisation’s.
The nomination period will be open all month, people can nominate in the comments of each month’s post, on twitter, or by email to prowomenscycling [at] gmail [dot] com. Once the nominations close, we’ll publish all the month’s nominees, with full links to their accounts, and put up a poll, which will be open for a week that anyone can vote for. We’ll then announce the winners!
There will be three categories:
- Women’s Road World Tour team** rider
- Team media
- Non World Tour riders (including MTB, track, BMX and CX – but they have to be racing in professional races)
At the end of the road season we’ll have a grand prize to recognise the great season-long work, which we’ll announce around Worlds, and we’ll include a prize for best race social media.
We hope you’ll enjoy this as much as we do! You can always send us nominations you’re not sure about, and we’ll tell you if they count or not, and you can put them in anonymously. Teams can nominate their riders, riders can nominate their team-mates, it’s all good. Our goal is that we all share some fantastic social media, and thank the riders and teams that make it for us. If you want some starting places to find it, check out Chloe Hosking’s list of road riders who blog, and Sarah’s twitter lists of women cyclists and teams.
If you have any questions, ask me on twitter – and Dan and I talked about this more in a recent podcast.
***
* Racing-month is a period we’ve made up to take into account that some races overlap months:
March = 27th February to 3rd April
April = 4th April to 1st May
May = 2nd – 29th May
June = 30th May – 26th June
July = 27th June – 31st July
August = 1st – 28th August
September = 29th August – 2nd October
** We know that “World Tour Team” isn’t an official designation, but we’re using it as short-hand for “The top 20 UCI women’s teams that were announced in January 2016 as getting automatic entry to the 2016 Women’s World Tour day races” because it’s shorter. I do understand that some people don’t like this, but it’s a lot better than “teams Sarah thinks are pro” which is the category I used to use to distinguish between the ‘pro’ teams and the small ones. Riders in pro teams will have so many more opportunities to go to the biggest races and so have interesting content, so we’re dividing it so other riders have chances too.
