Step one: win your country’s national championships.
Step two: mood board.
Step three: Ride around looking cool for a year (unless, of course, you win Nationals again).
When Michael Woods (Israel-Premier Tech) won the 2024 Canadian National Road Championships this summer, it was the culmination of a long and winding road to the top of the sport. Though it might not rate against some of the other wins on his palmares, it is a visible, tangible symbol of what he has accomplished as a cyclist. And it wasn’t an easy journey to get there.
After slogging it out on Continental teams for the first five years of his career, he made the jump to Cannondale - Drapac in 2016 as one of the oldest-ever neo-pros in modern cycling at age 29. He has since been a fixture of the WorldTour, with a Tour de France stage, multiple Vuelta a España stages and a World Championship medal to his name.
Since he and his family are based in Europe, Woods hasn’t had the opportunity to line up for many national championship races, so this year, he wanted to make the most of the opportunity. Without a Director Sportif on site for the race, Woods put together the race meeting himself.
“I made the powerpoint presentation. The plan was to get three guys in the break and then drive it and that’s exactly what we did, and obviously have me move as early as possible and have Pier-André [Côté] and Riley [Pickrell] if it came down to a sprint. It went down exactly as I expected. I knew we had the strength to really get separation,” Woods told Cycling Weekly.
After the win, Israel-Premier Tech’s Head of Marketing Phoebe Haymes reached out to ask Woods if he had anything particular in mind for a champion's jersey, and he knew exactly what he wanted.
“I really wanted to have my own mark on the jersey; I wanted to have control over how it looked," Woods explained. "I’m pretty particular around those things and I wanted to have it have a unique identity. Once Phoebe messaged me I already had some inspiration in mind of what I wanted the jersey to look like, and we started putting some stuff together.”
According to Haymes, national champion jersey designs are often constrained or at least watered down by the limitations placed on them.
“When a rider wins their national championships, how much influence they can have or how creative a team can be really depends on the country and their regulations as some federations require the jersey to follow a specific design.," she said. "Fortunately, Cycling Canada was very open to us going down a different route with the design and our race clothing partner Ekoï was as well.”
Woods’s inspiration came, in part, from the 1996 Canadian Olympic track and field uniform.
“The 4x100 Olympic gold and Donovan Bailey’s 100 meter gold in Atlanta were iconic moments for me. They inspired me to want to do the Olympics. [It was] just such a moment of pride for Canada," Woods said.
He also wanted to include another visual homage to Canadian sporting history—a hockey jersey.
“My basic ideas around the kit were to have it look like an iconic hockey jersey from the 80s and 70s," he explained. "I wanted to have that diagonal maple leaf across the front but still keep it relatively minimal.”
Haymes said, “Mike was definitely much more involved than most riders are and he deserves full credit for the jersey design. I pulled together an overview of the different men's and women's Canadian champion designs from recent years for him to look at and most riders would probably have just told me if they wanted a red base or a white base, for example, and leave the rest to us. But Mike knew exactly what he wanted in terms of going for a more retro-looking kit that took inspiration from his background in athletics and his love for ice hockey growing up.”
For Woods, keeping it simple was key.
“We put together initial drops and sent that to our designer at Premier Tech [Élie Desgreniers] and he put it all together. He actually had some touches that I didn’t like, so I pared him back, and we pretty much went with the original that Phoebe and I had from the get-go. I couldn't be happier with it.”
It took roughly five weeks for the finished product to show up in the mail in early August — just in time for him to show it off with a stage victory at the Vuelta a España.
Woods has the following items to last him through the rest of the season, at which point he will get a refresh with any necessary 2025 sponsor updates: 5 short-sleeve jerseys, 4 long-sleeve jerseys, 9 race suits, 5 bib shorts, 2 bib tights, and 2 gilets.
Woods’s teammate, Pier-André Coté, who rides for Israel-Premier Tech Academy, is the 2024 Canadian time trial champion. Since he also needed his own jersey design, Haymes made the suggestion that Coté’s jersey could be based on the 1976 Canadian Hockey’s “away” jersey (red with a white leaf) to complement Woods’s “home” inspired kit, but we've yet to see it.
