If, like me, you have an unhealthy obsession with time trial helmets, you’ll have noticed some interesting developments. The development is not in helmets themselves, but where they’ve started turning up – namely on the head of men’s Giro non-time-trial stage winners like Kasper Asgreen and sprinter Casper van Auden.
Many, many people were horrified to see this, on the reactionary aesthetic grounds that we cyclists deploy so often and so vigorously. Even van Auden was apologetic: “Maybe it doesn’t look the best, but I don’t care about looks, and we also said if we win today, nobody will care.” How wrong can you be, Casper? People care.
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Michael Hutchinson
Columnist
Michael Hutchinson is a former British and Irish cyclist who specialised in time trialling. He was UK national champion over all distances, holds over 50 national titles and represented Ireland at international level. He is an award winning author, coach and aerodynamicist. His Dr Hutch column has appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine every week since 2005
Why? Because I wasn’t just an early adopter of the long sock, I was more or less the first. Some tunnel testing had suggested that the more shin is covered the better. Everyone hated them. One organiser refused to let me into his race because of them. Instead he posted me a pair of white ankle socks that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a six-year-old girl on her way to a birthday party in 1955.
Despite this excellent piece of passive aggression, history has been on my side. Every time I see the UCI with their glorious sock measuring device, I swell with pride and think, “I did that.” In my downstairs loo my head might look funny, but my shins are bang up to date – unlike almost everyone I was racing against, who I imagine spend most of their time in the downstairs loo sobbing over their terribly old-fashioned looking ankles.
The downstairs loo test is not a good one-truth is, you’re going to look your age. If the photo is from 10 years ago, that’s what it’s going to look like. What looked weird then may, or may not, look weird now.
You have no control over this. If everyone in the bunch adopts TT-esque helmets, then anyone who has a prized photo of themselves in what’s currently a normal-looking helmet is suddenly going to have more in common with Sean Yates than Simon Yates. And it will only be a matter of time before CW reprints pictures of them in the historic photo feature so that Gen-Z can laugh at them.
How to….. park your bike at the cafe
There are two primary objectives of the cafe bike park. The first is to avoid getting your bike scratched by someone else parking another one on top of it. The second is to still own a bike when you come to leave. These two objectives are not always compatible with each other. The most reassuring approach is to leave your bike where you can see it.
This has numerous advantages. It gives you an excuse to avoid eye contact with your friends, and it means that if someone tries to make off with your bike, you can run after them in your cleats shouting, “Oi! Bring that back!” The main downside is that in winter you can probably only achieve this by sitting outside on your own. (Although this also is an excuse to avoid human interaction.) If you can’t do that, leaving your bike at the bottom of a heap of others makes it almost impossible to steal, but highly subject to damage.
A reasonable compromise is to make sure you arrive in close company with someone who has a much more attractive bike than yours – nothing decreases the attractiveness to thieves of a 10-year-old winter bike like parking it beside a shiny new Pinarello Dogma. If you own a Dogma, you’re probably better just skipping the coffee and staying outside hugging your bike. You’ll have a nicer time.
Acts of cycling stupidity
Last week, I headed out to meet a couple of friends for a ride. I got to the meeting point first and sat down in the handily-placed bus shelter to wait. A middle-aged woman walked past, glanced at me, walked on a little, then turned and came back. “Here we go,” I thought, expecting a lecture about abusing a bus shelter. But no. “Looking at you sitting there so totally exhausted – there’s a cafe just over the road, I’ll buy you a cup of tea if it would help?”
I explained that I lived five minutes away, and was waiting for some friends. “Oh, gosh, well don’t try to go too far!” she said. Clearly I don’t radiate the air of athletic vigour I thought I did.