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Comment by la_fayette | Hacker News Reader

Sorry but this is ridiculous! Everyone who participates at the olympics must be a professional athlete. Especially, if you are favorite.

Observing the environment around you should be obvious?! It is not like Anna Kiesenhofer had the one ring on her finger and was invisible...

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Ahhh, no. No! NO!

The Olympics as envisioned by Coubertin didn't allow professionals for a very long time, A VERY LONG TIME. For boxers this year is actually the first Olympics that do accept professionals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_Games#Amateurism_and_p...

This sounds rather idealistic and doesn't represent the reality, particularly for this female cycling race! The top competitors of Anna Kiesenhofer had professional contracts!

Yes, but this is a huge part of the history of the Olympics. The Dream Team in 1992, athletes who worked for their governments (and just trained full-time) in the 70s, athletes living an impoverished life for years while chasing their Olympic dreams (see Steve Prefontaine working as a bartender).

Curiously, every single soviet sports athlete who ever competed on any international event was considered an amateur, while in fact being a full time professional devoted to his sport.

Usually they were officially 'working' at some factory, but were members of a sports club and received a substantial stipend, never doing any work but training and competing. This practice still lives in Russia. The income of any Olympics team russian athlete is estimated to be no less than 5-7k USD, generally coming in the form of several grants and stipends.

It's the same for most countries, Germany has the Sportsoldat, employed by the military (and even more employed by the police) and they make up the majority of the German Olympic team. Not everyone likes this in Germany, but there's not much of an alternative in sight. The American U.S. Army World Class Athlete Program is tiny compared to the German practise.

She did not earn her money with cycling. Last year, her proffesion was Mathematics teacher. She was also far from a favorite for this race.

She spent one year in a proffesional group. The commentators were saying she really dislikes riding in 'the bunch'. Which would make proffesional cycling hard. She qualified through national championships, which are open to non-proffesionals.

As for invisibility, the person who came second thought they were first. So somehow they missed this. And she wasn't the only one who didn't know there was still someone ahead.

Non of this is meant to say Kiesenhofer did not deserve this. She rode an amazing race, and earned this gold medal.

And women's pro cycling pays very poorly compared to the Men.

Notably, 15% of men riding in the tour de France earn less than 45000 a year. That isn't a low salary, but for a proffesional athlete at the peak event, it isn't a lot either.

$45k is the very definition of "low salary."

This is just not true for the vast majority of the world. Not everyone is American and in tech.

Its euros. And its waaaay above minimum wage. In Europe, its above the "modal wage" aswell. I think in west Europe its about the average wage.

She's not a mathematics teacher, but a research mathematician.

She finished over a full minute ahead of second place and at one point had as much as a ten minute lead. She was out of sight for most of the race.

Ok so you want to explain to me that when she was breaking out from the group at the beginning she was invisible?

As you can also read in the linked article, she broke away with some others, as is usual in cycling. After a while the peloton caught up with the breakaways, thinking they're now racing for the lead. But they didn't realise Anna Kiesenhofer wasn't among them, as she is a virtually unknown amateur, so nobody missed her.

Excuse us, she never was an virtually unknown amateur. 2017 she got a professional contract from a Belgian team, but refused to cycle on their "stupid" rules. She rather went by her own rules, without a team and didn't need the money. 2018 she was 5th in the European time trials. She constantly rode, but not so much on professional UCI events, but also on many amateur marathon events. Which she thought were harder and better. She was official Austrian champion afterall.

The peloton just missed her, due to complete lack of communication amongst the disfunctional leading dutch team. There were many dutch and other coaches on the street with cellphones, but they didn't try to catch her, so she was lucky. A properly organized peloton would have caught her easily. You could see with your own eyes how disorganized the peloton was. Extremely interesting case for social studies.

Yeah, I don't mean to discredit her. Just saying the peloton didn't think of her as they caught up with the front runners, as they didn't really know her. Exactly for the reason you state: she didn't attend a whole lot of pro events.

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