Since it was noticed that the gold medal-winning ride of Linda Villumsen at the UCI Road World Championship elite women's time trial was not on her trade team Wilier, there have been wildly varying opinions on whether or not her UnitedHealthcare team should have reprimanded her - or contemplated firing her - before her victory on an un-branded-but-obviously-a-Trek bike.
In a sport where sponsorship funds the teams, rather than ticket sales and TV rights, keeping sponsors happy is of the utmost importance - even more so on the women's side. A team of women, no matter how talented they are, are a hard sell for sponsors when they are not on prime time television and garner far less media attention than the men.
Professional cyclists, men and women, are first and foremost marketing tools for their sponsors, and secondly athletes who happen to be fast on a bike. They are put through sometimes tedious and often downright embarrassing lengths to promote their sponsors' products (including spooning with your teammates on your sponsor's mattress... ahem, Etixx). If sports drink that gives your team money might taste disgusting, you clandestinely fill the bottles with something else. You might think your helmet makes you look like Swiss Miss, but you carry on wearing it because you do your job.
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The real conflicts come in when the equipment the team provides a rider inhibits their ability to perform to their best. It is clear that Villumsen's decision to ride her blacked-out Trek and not the Wilier was the right one for her personal goals - her bike was a huge factor in a race won by less than three seconds - but the damage done to her team goes beyond criticism in the social media and a few news stories.
If a sponsor's product isn't going to be on TV, the next best way to get a return on their investment in the riders is to use photos of them racing in printed ad campaigns. Imagine what was going down at Wilier headquarters when Lisa Brennauer came across in third and Villumsen became world champion. All of those photos of her victorious ride? Useless.
One could argue that Wilier should have stepped up and provided Villumsen with a frame that allowed her to achieve her optimal position on the bike. Women her size around the world can attest - most bike companies neglect small riders, and by all accounts the smallest Wilier is more than two centimetres higher in the head tube than the comparable Trek. But Trek has led the way in the industry in women's-specific design, Wilier has not yet followed. On their website they have made no attempt to market to women, they sell men's apparel but not women's, and have no women's range.
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