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The Dew Tour's Feminine Mystique: Going Retrograde

Louisville Kentucky, a town known more for horses, jockeys and baseball bats than bikes, action sport stars and boundary pushing, blew up this weekend with the Panasonic Open, the first stop on the 2006 Dew Tour. As one of the most comprehensive, high-profile and wide-reaching events in the US action sport arena, the Tour is a mobile Mecca for the true believers and a gateway to land-bound adventure for the Seekers. Given this scale, scope and significance, then, it was jarring to find a total lack of female athletes in the entire, multi-day competition. In fact, not a single woman is slated to compete in any event, in any city, of the entire 2006 Tour.
 
The core issue of this stunning oversight is not purely knee-jerk gender discrimination, but an unfortunate unfulfilled vision of where these sports are going, and who’s ushering them into the next era. For a tour that is fundamentally about innovation, ambition, and the evolution of these athletic art forms, the absence of women on it indicates not only a lost opportunity, but also that the Tour, for all its very real presence, importance and professionalism, is also a partially obscured presentation of the possible. When so much of the public draw to these kind of events stems from a desire to see how athletes can innovate a boost off a kicker; to find out how far someone can slide a rail; and to imagine how many rotations we could do on our own bikes in the local park, leaving a whole segment of the action sport population out of the equation diminishes some of the Tour’s potential value.
 
The huge range of industry experience and stature represented on the Tour, coupled with a high bar for expertise overall, would suggest that the talented of any gender would be welcomed onto ramps. As it is, the Tour, which made its debut last year, features some of the world’s best action sport athletes in several disciplines, from 11-year-old skating phenom Nyjah Huston to legendary FMX rider Mike Metzger. One of the most unique and significant aspects of the Tour is just this embrace of pure talent and innovation, while still keeping a spotlight on the heavyweights that got us here, like Metzger, BMXer Dave Mirra and skating’s Bob Burnquist. 
 
Historically, the general paucity of truly competitive female action sport athletes has posed logistical challenges to the inclusion or creation of women’s action sport events, with the better girls usually competing against boys and men during their formative years.  But it’s 2006, and there are some ladies going huge and pushing the edges of success in the same sports we’re all doing.
 
The inclusion of some of the top female athletes in the action sport arena could have easily paralleled the talent and experiential diversity of the men’s roster on the Tour. Several such picks could have included up-and-comers like etnies Girl team skater Lauren Perkins and BMXer Stacey Mulligan and more seasoned skaters like Lyn-Z Adams Hawkins and etnies Girl rider Elissa Steamer. Apart from sending a philosophical message to the women’s action sport professionals and to the industry as a whole, the inclusion of some ladies on the Dew Tour would also be a symbolic invitation to a wider demographic that’s gravitating towards these sports in increasing numbers. 
 
With established legends and emerging stars from each respective sport represented on the Dew Tour, the Louisville stop was largely an impressive demonstration of what the action is all about, and, in part, of where the sports are going. But the concurrent absence of women on the Tour is not just another message to athletic leaders like Mulligan, Perkins or Adams, but also to amateur enthusiasts, the action-curious, and the unconverted who might want to try a kickflip if they saw it on TV-- ie, the industry’s future.
                                                                                                        

    --Anna Dimond