Celebrating Alfonsina Strada, the woman who cycled the Giro d'Italia

It's official. This is a "big year" for women's cycling. When the Women's Tour rolled out of Oundle it hoped to leapfrog all contenders to become the biggest stage race in the women's calendar. And when La Course rolls out to cover its 13 circuits of the Champs Elysees – that iconic stronghold of the masculine sport – it will offer the single richest prize in women's cycling: €22,500, the equivalent to winning a stage in the Tour de France.

The Giro is currently the only Grand Tour that offers a feminised version of itself and it's a poor reflection of the men's event that turned Ireland pink last week. Shortened and rebranded, it is forced to compete with the Tour de France in July instead of running concurrently with the men's race. But when the flag dropped on the Corsa Rosa in Belfast, it marked 90 years since Alfonsina Strada became the only woman to smash through the gender barrier and officially ride a Grand Tour in 1924.

The young Strada was 5ft 2in of muscular dynamism. Athletic and powerful, crouched low over the handlebars, clad in trademark black wool jersey and black socks with hair fashionably bobbed, the "Devil in a Dress" was determined that gender would not decide how and where and against whom she competed.

She asked for – and received – a racing bike for a wedding present and earned herself an invitation to compete in Russia in the Grand Prix of St Petersburg in 1909, where she was acknowledged as the "Best Italian Cyclist". She role the Tour of Lombardy in 1917 and 1918 against the likes of Philippe Thys, the three time winner of the Tour de France of whom Desgrange says: "France is not unaware that, without the war, the crack rider from Anderlecht would be celebrating not his third Tour, but his fifth or sixth." In this wartime race, the organisers were happy to be able to field a competition at all and the rules did not explicitly state, as they do now, that women cannot ride against men.

Born in Northern Italy in 1891 at the height of the bicycle craze, when the advent of the "freedom machine" took women into public spaces and on to a parity with men, Alfonsina's family were too poor to own a bicycle. Two wheels may have given physical expression to women's desire for emancipation but that was a solidly middle class desire. Like many male professional cyclists, Alfonsina's first contact with a bicycle was through a machine used for work not pleasure.

When her father, a day labourer, traded 10 chickens for a battered old bike, Alfonsina received her own freedom machine. She taught herself to ride at 10 and won her first race aged 13, earning a pig for first prize. In 1911 she broke the women's speed record set six years earlier by Louise Roger. She clocked 37 km/h on a 44-pound single-geared bike; multiple world champion Marianne Vos now rides a 17-pound 10-speed carbon frame. Alfonsina's record stood for 26 years.

Alfonsina was greedy. She wanted to devour public space, to display her strength and muscularity, to eat up the opportunities to race and compete. Her family were desperate for her to settle down, to remain decorously at home stitching and seaming, not tearing around the village on her bicycle terrorising the black clad vecchie who crossed themselves as she passed. She had her revenge, telling her mother she was off to Mass and then going to compete on a Sunday.

The backlash against the freedom machine was swift and ferocious. Women who rode were treated like performing monkeys. They were considered fair game to sexual advances for imposing themselves on the public realm. They were accused of finding salacious pleasure in the vibration of their saddles.

Alfonsina endured the name calling, the accusations of immorality, the Hobson's choice of women's work or marriage. Alfonsina got lucky; in Luigi Strada she met a man who not only indulged her passion but encouraged it, giving her a racing bike and training her on the streets of Milan, where the sight of women competing against men had been a popular one in the 1890s until a outraged Unione Velocipedista Italiana banned women from competition in 1894.

There was no sense of sisterhood for Alfonsina. The 1923 Almanac for Italian Women declared that the purpose of sport was not to "force the body to dangerous excesses and ridiculous exaggerations". The women who watched Alfonsina competing with the men in 1924 were duly scandalised, believing the tomboyish woman with the bare legs to be entirely unrepresentative of their sex. In the short-lived Grand Boucle Feminin (the women's Tour de France), they awarded the "Golden Gloves" to the most elegant, best turned-out rider. Plus ça change.

That the barriers that existed for Alfonsina – insults masquerading as harmless banter, the threat of physical violation as a means of social control, a strongly gendered sport and the pull of family and responsibility – are still identified as barriers to women's participation in cycling today is a mark of the limited distance we have travelled in the 90 years since Alfonsina stood on the start line in Milan.

Was she invited or did she trick the organisers into letting "Alfonsin Strada" pin on race number 72 that morning? For a race that was missing stars like Ottavio Bottecchia and Costante Girardengo, absent due to a dispute over pay, a performing monkey was a valuable publicity coup and La Gazzetta dello Sport's editor Emilio Colombo was quick to exploit Alfonsina's appeal. Ninety riders accepted the Giro's offer of food, board and massage and Alfonsina was the one that attracted most attention. They came to cheer, to jeer, to ogle: "In only two stages this little lady's popularity has become greater than all the missing champions put together."

Alfonsina was determined to parlay this new found popularity into a career. She started referring to herself as a "professional cyclist". She assumed she would be back at the Giro in the future – after all Colombo had done everything in his power to keep Alfonsina in the race, offering her 500 lire to ride on when she was on the brink of retiring through sheer physical exhaustion.

Because this race is hard - it's over 4,000km longer than the 1923 edition and eight of the 12 stages featured major mountain passes. The shortest stage, which took the race from Rome to Naples was 250km ridden in terrible heat and dust, dimming the "radiant" Alfonsina who arrived on the start line in a "new bright outfit" and ear-rings; the longest was a 415km monster that brought the riders into Fiume, where Alfonsina arrived in tears and was carried from her bike by the adoring crowds who had warmed to this courageous woman who was determined to pedal every metre of the roads that link Milan back to itself via the virtually impassable, potholed, rock-strewn strada sterrata of the South.

But Alfonsina came unstuck, finally. As the race headed north through the Abruzzi region, long, hard kilometres along the spine of Italy where the land trembles and amplifies the seismic waves of its frequent volcanic eruptions, the weather turned. Wind driven whips of rain lashed the riders as they struggled over the Campannelle and the Forca Canapine. Wet wool clung to sodden skin, hair plasters stuck to scalp, wind battered eyes peered through the curtains of endless stinging rain. The poor roads worsened. Torrents of mud sent riders slipping and sliding into the mire. Frederico Gay lost any hope of challenging for the race as eventual winner Giuseppi Enrici took the stage and the race lead by 40 minutes.

Alfonsina fell. She punctured on these roads that were no longer roads and broke her handlebars, repairing them with a broom handle. She slipped, a wheel slid and she heard the crunch as flesh and bone hit rock. But still she rode on, her knee bruised and swollen. Outside the time limit at the finish line, Colombo could no longer legitimately keep her in the race. Recognising her value to his Giro, he personally paid for her bed and board, provided her with a masseur, defended her in the Gazzetta and encouraged her to hand out signed photographs along the route.

Often alone, often in the dark, Alfonsina continued to ride every single millimetre of the 3,613km route. She arrived in Milan a heroine of sorts, feted by Mussolini and King Victor Emmanuel, the recipient of cups and medals, jerseys and ear-rings and a 50,000 lire prize raised by donations from a newly sympathetic public.

Alfonsina could now consider herself a true professional cyclist. She had just completed a race that only a third of the 90-strong peloton has seen through to the end and she had outridden several of them. She had proved that a woman could survive in a man's race. But she was never to ride the Giro again.

By 1925, the disputes were settled and the race no longer needed its performing monkey. Colombo personally refused her request. This is the same man who had written: "Alfonsina doesn't challenge anybody for victory, she just wants to show that even the weak sex can do the same as the strong sex."

It's a challenge that still faces the women's sport, 90 years later. Strada was never seen as a genuine competitor – she was a distraction, her naked legs shocking, her courage to be applauded – but she was only ever a participant, a charming sideshow, a "schoolboy playing truant". Ever the performing monkey, bedecked in gaudy baubles – the pet of the race, never a serious athlete.

Though she made a career on the track and broke the women's speed record aged 47, she could never translate her Giro heroics into any more than a narrative to inspire romantic books and comic strips. Alfonsina's career ended in circuses, riding the rollers. Once more the performing monkey.

Women's cycling, as it embarks on this annus mirabilis, remains a Potemkin village, its gorgeous golden surface concealing the fake behind the facade. As Lizzie Armitstead told Rouleur: "There's no women's programme. There's no women's road academy. There's no pathway for women." British Cycling currently has no plans to start a women's road team even though the costs are a drop in the multimillion dollar ocean of financing a men's team. Armitstead doesn't expect any support for the road riders come Rio, either.

Where Strada faced the twin hegemonies of the Catholic church and a Fascist regime that would increasingly discriminate against female athletes whose "fundamental mission" was surely maternity, today's women riders participate in a sport that remains deeply, perhaps irremediably, gendered. Unlike tennis or golf, the women's sport continues to lack high levels of sponsorship and exposure. There is no will to accommodate the women's sport in a man's world.

Strada wouldn't recognise the word "sexism" but she would recognise its effect on her career. It's there at every level of women's participation – from the catcalls endured by women commuters to the "banter" on male dominated club rides to the sexism faced by a professional sport that attracts just 0.5% of sponsorship and is rendered virtually invisible.

The modern Grand Tours, limited to 3,500km over 21 stages, look Lilliputian compared to Alfonsina's Giro. She rode a single speed bike along unmade roads of post-war Italy, but now, 90 years later, women engaged in the domestic racing scene who want to cross the line from participant to competitor have precious few opportunities beyond the track-focussed performance programme. Races such as the Women's Tour and La Course remain as inaccessible as the 1925 Giro was to Alfonsina Strada.

There remains the sense that there is no real appetite at the very top of the sport to change and sustain growth. The post of women's representative for British Cycling is a voluntary one. There are no women on the senior management team. Instead, white male after white male face stares out from the BC website. Of the 20-person US Cycling board, only four are women. Not a single president of a French regional committee is a woman. The only female member of the European Cycling Union is, unsurprisingly, from the Netherlands – a country where 55% of women cycle regularly.

White men dominate at national and international level and at grassroots too. So much of the women's sport in the UK is run on an amateur basis that one way for women to make a profound difference to the gender imbalance may be to get into the sport at ground level, volunteering as marshalls and race organisers. But volunteering requires time and commitment and patience. Little wonder that, as Emma Pooley points out, so many women abandon administrative roles in the sport disillusioned with the lack of money, with always being seen as second best.

Traditionally married to the Olympic funding cycle of track success, the tectonic shift towards the road grinds slowly onwards. Cyclocross has pioneered the move towards equal prize money for women and both the Women's Tour and La Course will do the same – the prize for the French race, at €22,500 is by some margin the richest in the sport. Giro Donne winner and world champion Emma Pooley can earn more by finishing third in a triathlon in the Philippines than she has ever won in a bike race.

Women working together can be powerful. Strada was alone in the male peloton but the Le Tour Entier movement has achieved the seemingly impossible, getting its feet under the table with ASO, the biggest power player in the sport. The result – a 90km one-day race along the length of the Champs Elysees, where the Tour de France will finish, as it has done every year since 1975, the cream of women's world cycling competing on the biggest stage in the sport. It's baby steps towards Le Tour Entier's ultimate goal of a proper women's Tour de France.

Marianne Vos, the multi-disciplinary multiple world champion believes that the next step should be a fully integrated racing calendar. For Nicole Cooke the key issue remains a minimum wage that makes cycling a viable professional career. For Lizzie Armitstead it's the lack of World Tour teams, including Sky and Quickstep, supporting a women's team. But the disconnect between what women want and what men are willing to offer remains. Brian Cookson, head of the UCI, who championed the women's sport in his pre-election manifesto, makes much of new coverage of the women's World Cup and an investment in social media. That the coverage is a thirty minute highlight package and the UCIWomenCycling Twitter account currently has 4,045 followers while the UCI President continues to refuse to countenance a minimum wage says a great deal about that disconnect.

And then there are the podium boys. When Alfonsina fell off her bike with exhaustion in Fiume, she was greeted by an adoring crowd who had waited hours for her to arrive. Not for her the flowers or the protocol of the podium. But the winner of La Course will be greeted with the full pomp and ceremony of a podium presentation including a kiss from a podium boy. Setting aside the enforced heteronormativity of it all, we are back to pointing and staring at the performing monkey. Unless of course the podium boys arrive in gilded hotpants and jackboots, serving to highlight the sheer absurdity of it all.

Alfonsina Strada rode the Giro 90 yeas ago because she wanted to have the opportunity to compete at a level that was otherwise unavailable to her. In 1983 Robin Morton became the first woman directeur sportif at the Giro. The race organisers had to vote as to whether she'd be allowed to ride in a team car; her male colleagues gave her the cold shoulder. It has taken 31 years for Rachel Heal to repeat the experience, when she took charge of the United Healthcare team at this year's Milan-San-Remo. She praised her team for not pigeonholing her but even so the other male directeurs did a double-take to see a woman driving the team car.

And yet the sport has come a long way – attracting sponsorship like never before, the tipping point may yet be reached. When Cookson uses the business analogy of a corporation actively seeking to exclude 50% of its potential customer base he comes closest to making the clear economic case for investment in the women's sport. And the goodwill has been apparent in the crowds lining the route for the Women's Tour, the will for this year to finally be the year when women's cycling jumps the gender gap. Tectonic plates. Baby steps. Pick your battles. Remember, you have podium boys now! And ride little monkeys, ride – but make sure the tune your pedals dance to is your own.