When Honor Elliott was tasked with making the spookiest costume she could for a Halloween cyclocross race, she asked herself a simple question. What’s the scariest thing in cycling at the moment?
The answer came to her quickly: "The state time trial helmets have gotten themselves into."
Together with her boyfriend, Theo Clarke, Elliott sketched out designs, prepped the papier-mâché, and mocked up a giant version of cycling’s most talked-about lid: the Giro Aerohead II, sported by Visma-Lease a Bike and Canyon-Sram.
She then wore it on Saturday evening as she competed at Rapha’s Muddy Hell event in Herne Hill, London, riding it to an impressive second place.
“I would say it was credit to the aerodynamics, but it wasn’t,” she laughed, speaking to Cycling Weekly. “It felt like I was wearing a massive sail on my head. If I rode in a straight line, I could feel the wind blowing me from side to side. When I was on the velodrome, people were saying it was wobbling.
“It was so funny, because it wasn’t a windy evening, but I put the helmet on and I could hear wind. I was like, ‘What are these massive gusts?’ But it was only because I had this huge wind blocker on my head. In terms of dexterity of my limbs, [it was] perfect, I could ride my bike well, but obviously it did slow me down.”
The idea, Elliott explained, came to her “a while ago”. Having dressed up as a snail and viral road rage driver Ronnie Pickering in previous editions of the event, she wanted something with more “structural integrity” this time round. The helmet was the perfect solution.
“I needed to come up with a concept that was funny and good, but also that would hold up,” she said. “It’s been in my brain for longer than I should really admit, but it was pulled together in the week before the race, very, very last minute.”
It took around six hours for Elliott’s boyfriend, Clarke, to make the helmet, also making one for himself, an oversized mock-up of the Kask equivalent worn by Ineos Grenadiers.
“I did the design and the concept, and he did all the manual labour,” Elliott said. “He was doing a layer before and after work each day, in his workshop. We completely underestimated how time-consuming papier-mâché is. I’ve never done it before, so I felt a bit sorry for him. He was going to work early and coming back at eight everyday.
“It’s literally just papier-mâché around a big balloon. We popped the balloon, cut it in half, and then we each had a helmet. We painted it, and it was taped to our actual helmets with velcro tape. It’s pretty simple engineering.”
When Elliott revealed the helmet for the first time, lining up in it to race, “everyone was staring and pointing,” she said. “I felt a little bit awkward, but I knew it was because I had a big helmet on my head. It got a lot of laughs.”
Both amateur racers, Elliott and Clarke are also keen content creators, and share videos from cyclocross and gravel events to their YouTube channel. The Halloween-themed Muddy Hell, held under darkness at London's Herne Hill Velodrome, is one of their favourites to attend. “It’s fun and silly, but also competitive,” Elliott said, but this year’s edition ended in controversy for the pair.
“The helmets didn’t win best costume,” she added. Instead, the awards went to a rider disguised as Corpse Bride, from the Tim Burton film, and another dressed as a centurion. A fan dressed in Tour de France polka dots won the prize for best spectator costume.
“The whole evening was so intense, we didn’t really get much chance to actually soak it in,” Elliott said. “Cyclocross is so silly, but we can all take it seriously as athletes. But you can never take it that seriously, because you’re rolling around in mud half the time, and Muddy Hell is kind of the epitome of that. It’s just a more extreme version of that.”
Video footage from this year’s event will be shared on Elliott and Clarke’s YouTube channel in the coming weeks.
