Girls are believing less and less that they can reach the top levels of sport – how can we bridge the 'dream deficit'?

Did you ever dream to race the Tour de France? To win the Giro d'Italia? To get to the tree at the end of the road faster than your friend?

Kids have a way of looking at the world and thinking that anything is possible. I grew up playing the clarinet and tunnel-visioned my world into going pro. Spoiler alert: it never happened, but I still remember the clarity of that dream, the sureness that it could happen.

But when it comes to sport, girls are suffering evermore from what Women in Sport has called a 'dream deficit'. They measured how likely girls and boys were to believe they could reach the top levels of sport, and marked a 30% dream deficit for girls, the largest gap in the aspirations of girls and boys since tracking began.

And as girls grow older, these numbers drop even further. Only 27% of girls aged 13-16 dream of “reaching the top” in sport (vs 52% of boys), with 22% of 17-19 year olds and 23% for 20-24 year olds.

The reasons for this are varied and often hard to measure. Girlguiding’s Girls' Attitude Survey found that 46% of girls between the ages of 11 and 16 reported hearing boys saying that women’s sport is inferior to men’s. At many schools across the UK these perceptions are confirmed by break-time football pitches full of boys, and bike sheds reserved almost entirely for boys' bikes. It was so rare to see a girl cycling to my secondary school, I can't think of a single time I saw it happen.

“I remember being in school and PE [Physical Education] was drastically uncool for a while,” Emily Lewis from GirlsBike2 told Cycling Weekly. “I'm not sure how much the dial has changed on that. We do mountain biking and you do end up looking a bit dishevelled and sweaty in public when your mates are around. Sometimes we go on rides into the park, and some of the kids will be like, "Oh my God, there are my friends from school.””

Having been a teenage girl (albeit a decade ago), I still remember the conflicting expectations placed on our growing shoulders: be pretty but not over-confident; clever but not too clever; skilled but only in sports deemed “ladylike”; be both young women and children. Looking back now, I can see these concealed messages more clearly.

As a teenager, they were so woven into my experience of school and life that grappling with them was a constant low-level stress, as I negotiated life with a body changing faster than I could recognise. I remember my friend waxed her face with a leg wax strip, taking off a layer of skin in the process. Your teenage years are a messy, confusing time, full of lip-ripping mistakes and embarrassing interludes. And for me and my friends, PE was the first to fall at the altar of teenage squeamishness.

And yet, while girls tend to be less physically active than boys, seven in ten would like more opportunities to take part in sport and physical activity. It was as true then as it is now: we all want to move.

This is why Beicio Cymru started Pedal and Picnic. Aimed at teenage girls aged between 11 and 17 who live in deprived areas of Wales, groups are led on guided bike rides with a picnic stop at a viewpoint, historic site or sports venue.

“The focus isn't purely about riding a bike,” Ffion James, Development Manager at Beicio Cymru told Cycling Weekly. “It's more about social connection and using the bike to get around as well and help the girls get to know the local area.”

The initiative was first rolled out in Llanrumney in Cardiff, after consultation with over 200 teenagers conducted by Cardiff Metropolitan University into the barriers faced by young girls getting into cycling.

“They don't feel that confident, they don't know where to go,” James said, “but there was also a lot around not feeling that safe to go out riding as well.”

Over in Burgess Park in London, Community Cycleworks noticed another pattern: boys were coming to their mechanic workshops and mixed rides, with little to no attendance from girls in their community.

To address the imbalance, the team created GirlsBike2, weekly rides for girls and non-binary young people aged between 8-16 to learn skills and build community around cycling.

“It's much less common for girls to be riding than boys, and it's much, much, much less common for Black girls to be riding,” group leader Lewis said.

While Women in Sport found that sporting aspirations fell amongst all ethnic groups, they found that Black girls dreamt the biggest, followed by ‘White Other’ girls and Mixed Race girls. The fact that aspirations drop across the board is devastating, and the task remains clear: how do we keep all girls dreaming?

“At GirlsBike2, it’s predominantly made up of girls from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds. We've recruited on purpose, because I think that race is also a huge barrier to starting cycling,” Lewis said.

While it was hard for Lewis to find people of colour to lead the rides, one graduate group rider has trained as an assistant coach and will be helping lead the cycling groups.

“What we try to do is make cycling normal for girls for whom it otherwise wouldn't be possible," she continued. "We introduce them to the idea that cycling is out there in lots of different forms. They can have a go, and they know it exists. And I think that is the very first step in solving this problem.”

Getting girls into cycling is important. It can transform their physical and mental wellbeing, help grow a sense of independence and connection to place. But what about when it comes to dreaming about what’s next?

The girls who say they “love sport” are those who most experienced the steepest drop in dream rates, falling by 35% compared to a decline of 15% for boys.

Nurturing the transition space between people riding in clubs and racing for elite teams is therefore a precious channel through which girls can move to the next level of their sport. And it’s the space the London Academy has carved out in their corner of the capital. Led by Sarah King, the London Academy is a domestic race team, with the mission to get more women racing - and staying in racing.

“A lot of teams want to go to the next level, the next level, the next level,” King explained to Cycling Weekly. “And that kind of erodes the grassroots scene sometimes, because there isn't just as quickly new teams appearing. So my idea is that we stay in this place, and the riders move through the team, rather than me moving [with them].”

The London Academy is about creating a supportive community for the riders coming through, with skills sessions, workshops and mentoring programmes designed to build confident, connected racers.

“We won't just say, here's a load of races, get on with it. We'll be there for all the steps of it,” King continued. “We understand that sometimes it goes wrong, and we understand that you've got a life around it as well. We ask: how can we get the best out of you and be in a place where you want to keep doing the sport rather than exit because it becomes too challenging?”

King explained that women’s professional racing offers something men’s doesn’t. With less funding on offer, and a steadier pace of growth, King believes the women’s grassroots scene to be more reliable than the men’s, better equipped to weather the unpredictability of elite racing.

Yet, for all of these women and the communities they’re building up, funding remains a constant, occasionally impassable obstacle in the development of women’s cycling. Lewis would like to see specific coaching sessions for older teenagers, who tend to drop off for fear of being seen cycling with younger learners, but funding is tight for GirlsBike2 as it is. A simple Google search for women’s cycling communities and many funded programmes seem to have hit a wall in 2017, Facebook pages left for years without updates.

“We're a small team. We don't have loads of cash,” King said of the London Academy. “We didn't do it when we started. But the biggest thing I found is that I could still help people and support people by just being conscious of what the barriers were and what was stopping people.

“So if you're running an event, how can you make it more friendly for women and girls turning up? What are the changing facilities like? Are there period products available? There's all sorts of little bits that people can introduce into what they're doing.”

James recognises that more can be done without the need for additional funding. In Wales, racing giants like Geraint Thomas loom large, sometimes obscuring the many achievements of talented Welsh women.

“In Wales, we have such talented female athletes on the track and road,” James said. “We've got people like Anna Morris and Zoe Bäckstedt who are probably all going to win gold medals. It's kind of crazy. Then to think that girls don't believe they could make it… are we using those elite athletes to their full potential to inspire other girls to ride?”

The Women in Sport report makes it clear that a multi-pronged approach will be the way to bridge the dream deficit. “Visibility sparks belief," the report concludes, “but without tackling the structural and cultural barriers around safety, belonging and opportunity, many girls still don’t feel able to step into new spaces or feel that the pathways ahead are truly possible for them.”

While the work being done in London and Wales and in communities up and down the UK is encouraging, their feasibility will be increasingly squeezed as funding pots shrink.

This is a problem that transcends women’s sport: while the dream deficit has grown most for girls, it has dropped for boys, too. For this generation of cyclists, and the ones coming up behind them, it will be to their communities they will increasingly be turning.