Today Celebrate Women. Celebrate Cycling. Badass.

Today is International Women's Day. We're celebrating females bossing it up in the cycling world. Here are a few noteworthy women both current and historical handling their business and their bikes. Hell yeah. 

Modern Women:

Female Cyclist Forced to Wait After Catching Up to Men's Race

27-year old cyclist Nicole Hanselmann had a 2 minute lead when she was forced to take a 5 minute pause by race officials because she had caught up to the men's race. 

18 miles into the 75 mile Omloop Het Nieuwsblad race in Belgium on Saturday, March 2nd, Hanselmann was forced by race officials to stop and wait out a 5 minute delay. 

The reason? To allow more space between the men's and womens cyclists. The men's race had started 10 minutes before the women's and they needed to hold the women back. Nicole Hanselmann finished in 74th place overall and cited the forced delay as the reason for breaking her momentum. 

They don't make medals for people who need to be held back because they're dominating the road and caught up to the men who had a 10 minute head start. They should. 

Online Premier of award winning documentary "Mama Agatha"

Today, on International Women's Day, the 2015 documentary "Mama Agatha" by Palestinian filmmaker Fadi Hindash is making it's online debut. 

"Mama Agatha" was made in 2015 and follows a 60 year old Agatha Frimpong, a Ghanian immigrant living in Amsterdam, who runs a training program for migrant women new to Dutch society. Her 12 week course teaches women how to cycle, and integrate into Dutch society. The documentary shows how through cycling, migrant women are able to learn not just cycling mobility, but also social mobility in a new world. "Mama Agatha" has won the Audience Award at the Leiden Short Film Festival.  

Historical Women 

Annie Londonderry, the first woman to bicycle around the world, 1895. 

Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, born in 1870 is known as Annie Londonderry because her sponsor, New Hampshire's Londonderry Lithia Spring Water paid her to be known as "Annie Londonderry" for the duration of her trip around the globe. 

She had a 42 pound Columbia women's bike when she started on June 27, 1894 in Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts. To put the weight of this bike into perspective, we have ladies e-bikes that weigh around the same, motor, battery and all! 

Three months later, she met with Sterling Cycle Works, who offered to sponsor her and gave her a men's Expert Model E Light Roadster, which weighed 20lbs less than her original bike. This new bike however, did not have brakes, no freewheel mechanism and had only a single gear. 

Annie visited Alexandria, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Marseille, Jerusalem, Vladivostok and multitudes of other cities around the world (not in this order). She finally returned to Boston on September 24th, 1895. 

Kittie Knox

Katie "Kittie" Knox was 21 years old in 1895 when she walked into and presented her League Card at the annual meeting of the League of American Wheelmen, now known as the League of American Bicyclists. 

Kittie was a bi-racial woman wearing men's trousers presenting her membership card to an all white, male dominated institution in 1895. This is only one year after the League had passed a color bar that allowed only white people to declare membership. Although she was denied, her act of bravery, defiance and stance for equality on so many fronts did not go unheard. 

She singlehandedly sparked national discourse about female equality, racial equality, and even fashion in the cycling world and beyond.