These days, Rapha doesn’t have much in common with the company it once was (save, perhaps, for a certain contrasting armband) —the Rapha that produced the series of Continental films all those years ago. In the videos, riders adorned in wool clawed themselves up epic mountain passes of the American West and in doing so, achieved cycling immortality. It was a specific aesthetic, but it was groundbreaking for its time. Today’s Rapha is larger, broader. The company makes clothes for mountain bikers, Zwifters and loafing. But it also makes clothes for proper road bike racers.
Rapha’s first foray into top-level professional cycling, when the company sponsored Team Sky, is now over a decade past. Currently, the company is the clothing provider of EF Education-EasyPost and relies on its athletes to develop high-tech racing clothing. It wasn’t all that long ago that racing jerseys’ only function was as small, flappy billboards, and that was the end of it. Now that aerodynamics dictate such a big role in equipment choices, clothing has become one of the critical items deciding race outcomes.
