NED BOULTING
NED TURNS HIS EYE TO WHAT THE PROS WILL BE WEARING THIS SEASON
Following a couple of weeks of social media cold turkey during the season of actual cold turkey, I flapped open the laptop on 1 January to see what I’d missed while I’d been away from Twitter.
Scrolling past the increasingly amusing doodling of the gentleman who lives in a big white house in America, I realised that it was the most important day of the year in the cycling world. How could I possibly have omitted to rush online on New Year’s Day, when the cycling community goes into a tailspin of delight and dismay at the latest array of dismal kits to be worn by skinny people who couldn’t care less what they are asked to wear so long as the price is right?
I refer to the pageant of selfies, hitherto embargoed, of riders parading their new team colours. Some have switched teams, and are keen to get their new contracts off to a flying start by impressing the social media managers in their new employers’ PR departments, garnering as many likes and retweets as they can for their self-conscious posing in the mirror of a Novotel bedroom near Calpe in Spain. A post like “Can’t wait to get out on the road in these colours!” should normally be accompanied with the requisite number of corporate hashtags promoting the team’s ethos: #RideForWinning, #AllTheGlory, or, if you happen to ride for a French team #MaybeATopTen.
From there it’s over to Twitter, or at least that bit of it that is populated by cycling people, to dissect and discuss every kit in infinite detail. National champion kits are usually the first to be admired or shot down. Fabio Aru’s meagre-looking Italian national champ’s jersey has come in for plentiful scorn, for example, by the large and noisy constituency of cycling fans who think that only a full face painted with the Tricolore would be fitting. Likewise, that Ramon Sinkeldam and Arnaud Démare now both ride for FDJ, the Dutch and French champions respectively, and have been given full license to express their national identity by wearing kits that, if one of them were to stand on their head, would actually look identical.
Then there’s the much-discussed general trend; the overall colour palate that becomes discernible in the peloton. This has, over recent seasons, been black, then blue, with a brief flirtation with white, very little green, some yellow, plenty of red and a dispiriting lack of pink. Oh, and brown. Let’s never forget the brown shorts that have prevented Romain Bardet from ever fulfilling his true potential.
Team Sky still seems stuck on its fixation with boring. You might have thought, given all the mud that has been flung in its general direction, that it would have opted to change the script a little, lighten the mood with a frivolous ochre or a playful lime green. But no! It has simply swapped black for white, deadening it by association. I’m no Paul Smith, but I reckon I could have knocked that design up in PaintShop in, say, eight minutes.
Movistar has lost its dark blue for a kind of worse blue, and washed its kits in with the Katusha ones, causing the Russians’ white panels to become stained. You’ll never get that out. AG2R has gone a bit more boring, something that Abu Dhabi Team Emirates could hardly manage since it is, along with Lotto NL Jumbo, already unimaginably dull. Like BMC.
Other than that, it’s probably Garmin that has moved the most, in terms of image. I say Garmin, because I still don’t have the energy to learn its actual name, which is as long as this paragraph. There’ll be time for that. Its kit is okay, though, in that it is simply a bunch of disassociated loud colours, including pink, which I quite admire.
They all miss the point, though. Step outside the cycling bubble for a second, and you will find a universe of non-cycling folk who think all Lycra is risible. No matter how much you dress it up, it is skintight nylon with a padded arse bit. As soon as you step off a bike, and stand upright, especially on a stage, in front of a camera, or in the pixellated selfie gaze of a smartphone, wearing cycling kit, you have already lost at life. I think they may have a point. Let’s stick to the racing, shall we?
No matter how you dress it up, it is skintight nylon with a padded arse bit