There are few things I enjoy more in cycling-land than the arrival of a new time trial helmet. There’s a wet Paris-Roubaix. There’s watching the Tour de France peloton on Alpe d’Huez. But I love most our capacity for over-reaction, and for over-reaction a new TT lid tops all. But before we get to the latest offering from the comedy-meisters at Giro’s helmet division, we’re going to have a brief diversion into a bewildering theatrical experience.
A few years ago someone took me to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. This is not a semi-classic you’ve missed, it’s a comedy ballet company.
Very skilled, hugely athletic, and very confusing. Their opening number proceeded for several minutes to a respectful silence. Then for no reason at all the whole audience (other than me) laughed, uproariously. More silence. Then more inexplicable hysterics. If you knew all about contemporary ballet apparently the jokes were excellent. If you didn’t, it was like watching an un-subtitled Russian sitcom.
This is bike helmets. To a non-cycling outsider, literally everything we as a sporting collective have put on our heads since we invented the bike has been mystifying and ridiculous. From the embroidered and badged club caps of the 19th Century, to the beretta of the early 20th, to the ice-cream-seller casquette with the upside-down brim, to the bunch-of-bananas leather helmet of the 1970s and 80s and on to the many variations of re-purposed polystyrene packaging today.
Only if you are one of us can you not only accept these, but draw practical and aesthetic distinctions between them.
That’s before we even get to the most eccentric headgear of all, the time trial helmet. Like the comedy ballet, you really have to be a real connoisseur to look at one time trial helmet and accept it as totally normal, then look at another one and split your sides laughing.
So, then, the Giro Aerohead 2. It sticks out forwards in a way that, were it not for chip timing, I’d assume was designed to cross the finishing line quite a long time before the bike rider arrives. It’s properly weird looking, and when a time triallist tells you a helmet looks weird, you can take that to the bank.
The UCI is even now enjoying one of its relaxing coffee-morning discussions about whether (or perhaps just how) to ban it. It’s worth being clear that this discussion is not based on it being against the rules – it isn’t, even the UCI says so. Nor is it based on it being a surprise, since the UCI apparently saw the design before it was produced. It’s because in a world of strange helmets, it’s just very slightly too strange.
It's possible that what’s happened is that Giro went too far, and finally crossed a line-of-weirdness that’s always been there, and which we’ve been gradually approaching since the first East German track rider put what looked like half a watermelon on his head and sallied forth at the 1976 Olympics.
But I think, more likely, they just changed things too fast. If Giro had spent a couple of years and a couple of intermediate models working their way up to a giant shark-nose helmet, no one would have minded. If they’d done it with subtlety, by now anyone in a “normal” time trial helmet would be the butt of jokes – “Hey mister, the pointy bit goes towards the front!”
As ever, what cycling doesn’t like is anything too different from the things that already exists. Take three steps at once, and you’re in trouble. One step at a time and you can get anywhere.
The only upside to this is that with every new set of rules comes a new set of loopholes. I just can’t wait to see what accidental consequences the forthcoming bit of stable-door-bolting will produce. I’m kind of hoping for something with a propellor on top.
