In 1987, when he was still a runner, Marc Madiot had unflattering words about women's cycling, on a TV set with Jeannie Longo.
The current manager of the Groupama-FDJ team had thus claimed that a woman on a bicycle was "
ugly
" and "unsightly".
“Cycling is an extremely difficult sport.
Me, I love women too much to see them suffer, that's my personal point of view.
Now, if you like tearing yourself away on a bike, that's your problem, not mine,” Madiot argued.
In an interview with AFP, the ex-champion returned to this exchange:
“He evolved, he was a young man in the peloton.
I could cite others.
Some of them didn't particularly appreciate that I was put forward and that women did the same things as them.
They were giants of the road and we arrived as little dwarfs of the tarmac, as I called us at the time.