In sport, the maxim “separate but equal” generally defines male and female participation. Yet, should the separation of the sexes be maintained in sports where there is no intrinsic male advantage? Having won the British Darts Organisation’s women’s title, Anastasia Dobromyslova has become the lone woman on the Professional Darts Corporation (PDC) circuit. Today, her mettle will be tested as she takes on the PDC world champion, Phil “The Power” Taylor.
There have, of course, been “battles of the sexes” before. Famously, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs on Mother’s Day in 1973. However, Riggs was 55 and nobody suggested that King ought to be given wild-card entry into the Wimbledon men’s tournament.
Rather, it is in motor racing that there is the proudest tradition of pitting women directly against men at the highest level. Lella Lombardi’s drive in the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix may be the only occasion of a woman making it on to the Formula One scoreboard, but between the wars, a female driver repeatedly raced men to the chequered flag.
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She was the “Bugatti Queen”, Hell? Nice. The daughter of a French postman, Nice had been born H?lène Delangle in 1900 and made her reputation in her twenties as a dancer at the Casino de Paris, performing her more popular routines without the encumbrance of clothing.
She was an even bigger sensation when she turned her hand to motor racing. Her broad smile and gamine looks adorned billboards across France. A string of wealthy lovers, including Philippe de Rothschild, successfully battled for her attention. What was more, she was a demon behind the wheel. Not content with setting the women’s land speed record, she won her place on the men’s circuit. At the 1933 Grand Prix in Monza, she held on to ninth place in a race in which three male competitors were killed.
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Indifferent to danger, she was fighting neck and neck for second place at the 1936 São Paulo Grand Prix and pushing for the line when her wheels clipped a stray hay bale. Her Alfa Romeo Monza careered into the crowd, killing six people. She was in a coma for three days.
After the war she planned a comeback at the 1949 Monte Carlo rally. However, on the eve of the race, the Monegasque driver, Louis Chiron, publicly denounced her as a former Gestapo spy. He provided no evidence. An exhaustive trawl through the Bundesarchiv in Berlin by her biographer, Miranda Seymour, suggested she had not worked for the Germans.
But the mud stuck. Her career over, deserted by her fashionable friends and with her money misappropriated, Hell? Nice died, impoverished and forgotten, in a tiny rented attic flat in Nice in 1984. Hardly anyone turned up for her funeral. Only the path she blazed remained.