The Curious Case of Female Spectators in MotoGP

Last week during International Women’s Day, my colleague Tammy Gorali – the first female commentator ever in the MotoGP paddock, I should point out – tweeted some timely statistics about female attendance at MotoGP races.

In short, here tweets showed that over the past four years, the number of female spectators has declined an astonishing 19%. That’s no small drop, and the timeliness of that revelation should be noted.

On its face, this tweet showed that MotoGP was seemingly hemorrhaging female fans. But, the reality isn’t as clearcut, and this is also where things get weird.

Intrigued by Gorali’s info, I dug into the numbers a bit further to see what was behind this startling statistic. What I found was that if you pulled the scope back further by just one more year, then over the past five years female attendance at MotoGP races has actually increased by 33%.

If your brain is hurting right now, that’s ok, but it is difficult to understand how the number of women attending MotoGP races declined by 19% over the past four years, but increased somehow also increased 33% over the last five?

Keep on reading, and I will try and shed some light on this curious case of female MotoGP attendance.

The Joy of Cooking

Before I show you the raw data, we should have a conversation first about the source of this information and its reliability. All of the information that this article relies upon is provided by Dorna Sports, and I will be blunt and say that I believe that the books here are cooked better than a Thanksgiving Day turkey.

Anyone with casual experience with Dorna’s attendance figures, should be aware that they aren’t always grounded in reality, and are subject to a number of pressures.

You need to look no further than last year’s Jerez round, where seemingly half of the races normal attendance volume disappeared that race weekend. According to Dorna’s records, the 2016 Spanish GP had 120,255 spectators in attendance, a drastic drop from the 243,570 that were recorded in the year before, in 2015.

While those present in 2016 will confirm that the crowd size was smaller than in previous years, they will also attest that it was not half its normal size.

Who can say for sure how this count is so wildly different than before, though it is curious that the Jerez circuit was in serious negotiations at the time in regards to its future on the MotoGP calendar. If you can’t tell, I’m winking right now, on the other side of the computer screen.

I will let you come to your own conclusions on that, but for our purposes here in this story, I mention it only so we have some understanding that this data is certainly malleable, and has to be treated with a certain amount of skepticism. Still, I think some interesting trends can be observed.

In the table above, the total number of spectators for the year is again provided by Dorna, as is the percentage of women attending for the year.

The latter is determined by surveys that Dorna conducts, however I am not sure by what methodology. Thus the number calculated for female attendance is likely off from the true value, with a margin of error I would estimate to be give or take several hundred spectators.

Regardless of this margin of error though, there is clearly something interesting going on in the data trends, namely due to the 2013 MotoGP Championship season.

Powerful Personas

If we look back at the 2013 season, we can see that a lot happened in MotoGP land for that year, with the four biggest events being that 1) it was the first year without Casey Stoner in MotoGP, 2) it was the first year with Marc Marquez in MotoGP, 3) it was the year that Valentino Rossi returned to Yamaha Racing, and 4) the Austin round replaced Estoril on the calendar.

All four of these events shaped attendance considerably during the 2013 MotoGP season, and I opine that it had a dramatic affect on the series’ demographics as well.

Casey Stoner’s absence from the MotoGP Championship gutted attendance at the Australian GP, to the tune of roughly 45,000 spectators, for a 37% drop in attendance at Phillip Island.

That considerable drop in attendance though is masked by the surge in popularity that we saw at the Italian and Spanish rounds. Before we get into those numbers, I should mention that the attendance at the other rounds was relatively static, which makes these changes all the more important.

In Italy, the rounds at Misano and Mugello saw a noticeable uptick in attendance, 17% and 22% respectively. We can assume these gains come from Rossi’s return to Yamaha, and thus his return to being competitive once again on a MotoGP race bike.

To his credit then, we can account for an additional 34,000 Italian spectators during the 2013 season because of The Doctor’s change in livery and machinery. 

That number however pales in comparison to the changes at the four Spanish rounds, where 172,216 new fans showed up in 2013. Again, we can assume that the increase in fan attendance comes from a single rider, this time it being racing sensation Marc Marquez, who won the MotoGP Championship in his rookie debut.

Combined, the Spanish and Italian rounds account for over 206,000 extra spectators for the 2013 season, compared to the previous year – a critical amount when you consider that over the entire 2013 season, there were only an additional 216,213 new spectators attending the races.

These two figure are key for other reasons though, because the increases in the total number of women who attended MotoGP races in 2013 was 286,618.

By the time you start factoring in the growth from the other rounds, including the swap with Estoril and Austin (and how the latter affected Laguna Seca) the math comes extremely close to the showing that the entire attendance growth found in MotoGP for the 2013 season came from women alone.

That is either a fantastic realization, or a product of Dorna’s less-than-reliable counting methods, and we will never really know which of those two possibilities it actually is.

It’s All Downhill from Here…Or Uphill…Depending on How You Look at It

Make no mistake, the 2013 MotoGP season is an outlier in Dorna’s attendance figures, and it throws some wrenches into making conclusions about the state of the sport, in terms of how it appeals to female spectators.

My guess from the data provided is that Valentino Rossi and Marc Marquez are the two riders in the MotoGP paddock with the most general audience appeal, and that the numbers seen in 2013 reflect their ability to transcend the two-wheeled world of fanatics, and reach mainstream fans – men and women, alike.

From 2013 onward though, we see the slow trickle of women leaving MotoGP races. If you look at the four-year trend, MotoGP has lost 19% of the women it attracted in 2013, which is a big drop, but again we know that this is still a net gain for MotoGP over a five-year period.

In fact, it is an incredibly healthy gain to added 33% more women to the sport in just five years’ time. What changes that perspective though is knowing that the 33% increase in female attendees is a really squandered number, that was once 65% just a few years earlier. Round and round we go.

It is not uncommon to see punctuated growth in a business, followed by a decline that still results in an overall gain. And, that is what we are seeing here in Dorna’s attendance statistics.

With that perspective then, we should understand that the inroads made with female fans during the 2013 season show a missed opportunity for the MotoGP Championship, with over 140,000 women choosing not to attend another race by the conclusion of the 2016 season.

That suggests that there is something about the MotoGP Championship that is failing to make its sporting events “sticky” – that is to say, to keep the in-person fan experience enticing enough to warrant the return of a female spectator, each subsequent year.

What that fault could be is up for debate, and it includes everything from how women experience the atmosphere at the races, to the roles women play in the paddock itself, and to how the sport of racing motorcycle appeals to female spectators.

I have some thoughts on those subjects, but we will leave that debate for the comments section.

Source: Dorna; Photo: © 2016 Tony Goldsmith / www.tonygoldsmith.net – All Rights Reserved