You might have noticed that Jonas Vingegaard has taken to wearing a helmet that doesn’t match the rest of the Visma-Lease a Bike team’s. The reason is a private sponsor called Bygma. It’s not the first occurrence – Red Bull have been helmets ponsoring riders like Tom Pidcock and Zoë Backstedt for some time, along with supporting individual athletes in other sports ranging from cliff diving to bouldering
It’s a development that I like. For a start, I often worry about athletes not earning enough already, and I welcome any addition to the sophisticated mechanisms that the business of sport sponsorship already has for shifting money from my bank account to theirs. But also, I have spent years suggesting that if each rider on a team wore a different colour helmet it would make them easier to identify. My motives had a naïve purity, with the best interests of all at heart. But like everyone else, I’ll accept rapacious capitalism as a second best if it gets me where I want to go.
I want help recognising riders because I’m bad at it. I’m bad at it when they’re on TV; I’m bad at it in real life. In my first winter at my first club, I made friends with a guy who rode an old blue Cannondale. Around Easter he swapped it for his summer bike, a green Cannondale. I suddenly had no idea who he was and introduced myself all over again. I hadn’t made friends with him at all, just with his winter bike.
(Mrs. Doc loved this – when we first met, I hit on her, got turned down, and tried again 10 minutes later after she’d taken her jacket off and, to me at least, turned into a totally different person. I’d have looked very fractionally less stupid if I hadn’t told her how much I liked her hair first time around.)
While I often can’t identify the rider beside me, it’s surprising how often I can identify them from hundreds of metres away. There will be a pedalling style, or an angle of head. I once picked out my friend Bernard in the dark from the way his back light bounced over the potholes he couldn’t be bothered to ride around.
It’s similar watching racing on TV. Most of us can pick out the big names or a particular favourite from a shape, a style, or a helmet that never sits straight. There are other things – ex-national champions have very helpful stripes on their sleeves. For someone like me, though, they don’t help enough. 200 skinny bike riders doing 50kph is still too much like a high-speed Where’s Wally.
Yet some people seem very blessed in this area. I’ve sat beside professional commentators whose ability to instantly put a name to a second-string rider from Caja Rural-Seguras amid a group of doomed early attackers borders on witchcraft. I expressed some off-mic astonishment to one of them about an incident like this, and he said, “Well, he was in a break at the Basque Country in 2018,” as if that made the whole thing totally normal.
I’m especially bad, but I suspect that cyclists in general are not the sort of people you’d recruit to MI5 for their ability to pick people out of a crowd. I have a very happy memory of an event to promote one of my books. As I arrived at the venue, I got chatting to a member of the audience, who said, “Are you here for the Hutchinson thing?”
“Um, yes,” I said. “Did you get dragged here by your wife as well?” I said that I had. When I got on stage he was sitting in the front row. There wasn’t even a flicker of recognition.
