You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Picture the Giro in the 1940s. Or the TDF. Whatever old school bike race your brain wants to imagine. Somewhere in that timeline, there’s a rider sitting on the edge of a hotel bed rubbing cream into a piece of leather. That leather (the chamois) is stitched into his wool shorts, and if he doesn’t soften that thing before the stage, it’s going to crack and tear his skin apart somewhere around kilometre 120 (or sooner…probably sooner).

Now look at what you wear on your rides. You’ve probably spent real time thinking about the kit. How it looks. The colours, the fit, whether the socks match (kitmaxxing is a condition, and if you’re a sub of mine, then you definitely have it). But what about the pad in your bibs? You usually only think about it when it starts to cause problems. Is it the pad? Is it a seam? Are your shorts not tight enough? Is it the saddle?

Part one was about why cycling fabric chases watts while running chases temperature control. Part two is a little different. It’s about what actually touches your skin, from the chammy to the fabric, who really made it, and what to look for when buying a great pair of bibs.

WHO MADE YOUR PAD

As a trend in cycling apparel, the leather chammy lasted decades. Which might have been a little too long, tbh. Their asses must have felt like a baseball mitt (sorry for the imagery). Anyways… Around 1980, there was finally some innovation. A Japanese company launched a microfibre “pad” called Amaretta, and it was so close to buckskin that the only giveaway was the smell (it just didn’t smell like leather, which, obviously). In 1991, De Marchi patented a heat-moulded microfibre pad. The new age chammy was slowly evolving. The real leap though, the one in your bibs right now, the one that got me asking questions, came around the year 2000, when the pad learned to stretch. It moved with you instead of fighting you.

So who pulled that off? A company called CyTech, which started life as a De Marchi division. The actual brand name is Elastic Interface, and two cousins who worked at De Marchi, Marino De Marchi and Stefano Coccia, founded it around the year 2000. CyTech sold over 3.2 million pads in 2020 and sells in more than 40 countries, and De Marchi’s own blog says Elastic Interface is now widely licensed across many quality cycling brands. So there’s a good chance the chamois in your bibs, regardless of whose name is on the label, came from them. From what I’ve dug up, that kind of white labelling is common across cycling. The pad, the fabric, a lot of it. Most of it, really.

The Different Elastic Interface pads.

Now when it comes to bibs, everyone knows Assos makes some of the best in the game. Anybody who has the (deep) pockets to buy a pair will try to convert you to the holy church of Assos. Style wise, they’ve always felt bland, so I never paid much attention. Then again, bibs don’t need to be fashionable. They need to work. And everyone on my group rides has been preaching it all summer, so consider me converted (pray for my wallet). I really wanted to understand why Assos bibs are so good, so I tested my luck and went straight to the source. One of my subs (thanks Ollie!) put me in touch with Luca, Head of Product Development at Assos.

I asked him what people get wrong about the chamois. He started with how brands talk about them. “Most communication around chamois design stays very generic,” he said. “It never really goes into detail.” When’s the last time a brand told you what’s actually inside yours? Or why they selected said chammy and placed it that way (some chammies sit in the bib differently than others.)

ASSOS started talking to CyTech in 2001, and the relationship isn’t a normal supplier deal. It’s exclusive. “The design and materials are exclusive to ASSOS,” Luca said. “The design and construction of the chamois start directly from ASSOS. What CyTech does, starting from our input, is find the best possible compromise in terms of materials and processing.” ASSOS designs it. CyTech figures out how to build it.

So the name on the bibs says ASSOS, but the company that engineered the pad inside is one most riders couldn’t name (unless you geek out about this stuff). That’s the whole thesis here, and it’s what the rest of this article is about. The name on your kit isn’t always the one that made it.

Not everything in there is CyTech’s though. ASSOS has its own patent for how it’s sewn to the actual bib, and they call it “Golden Gate” (a little weird of a name for something that’s so close to your genitals, but alas, here we are). This patent is probably as important for comfort as the pad itself. The chamois is stitched down only at the front and back (hence the bridge reference), then left free everywhere else. We’re never 100% stable on the saddle (we wobble, we shift, we stand up at the lights), so the pad underneath us shouldn’t be either. It follows your body instead of following its own path.

ASSOS’s long-distance bib is the Mille GTO, and the pad inside it is called the S11. It’s 21 millimetres total, but that number is somewhat irrelevant because it’s two completely different foams stacked together. An 11mm layer for support, and a 10mm layer of much lower density for breathability (FYI, this pad takes a long time to dry post wash, so plan ahead cause the dryer ain’t an option). Pad height on its own is a marketing number. What really is important is foam density. Always take dense foam over thick padding. You’ll be thankful.

ASSOS GTO S11 pad

Out of curiosity, I also asked Luca if there was a material from a completely different industry he wished existed in a chamois. Something weird, something different. “Yes, but I can’t share it right now.” I’m choosing to read that as “something’s coming.”

THE MILLS NOBODY PUTS ON A JERSEY

Here’s something I only recently found out, and it changed how I view some brands. The pad isn’t the only place where white labelling happens. Plenty of brands, maybe most, don’t invent new fabrics, even when they say they do. They buy from a mill, order just enough meters that the mill lets them rename it, and market it as their own. Proof? I don’t have any tbh. It’s what I’ve picked up from a few convos I’ve had lately with designers at pro teams, and none of them wanted to go on record (shocking…). So you’ll just have to take my word for it.

That means the real invention happens somewhere in the “shadows”. The mills rarely get their name on a jersey, and a lot of the time they’re the ones doing the work. I find that odd about cycling because if you look at (hashtag) menswear, suiting brands will tell you exactly where the cloth comes from, and they’re proud of it. It’s a flex. Cycling should flex too. Fabric mills are super dope and they should be recognized way more than they currently are.

Polartec is the mill that breaks that pattern though, and it does it on purpose. They invented fleece in the 1980s, they make over 400 different fabrics, and their name travels with the fabric. That’s the deal. One of their sales agents put it plainly: “Polartec works on licensing agreements, so to be able to become a customer we will have to license the brand.” If you want the fabric, you take the name too. Rapha, Castelli, Santini, Sportful and Mavic have all done it. And it shows. Most technical kit (cycling or other) I’ve looked at that’s made with Polartec says so right in the specs.

It isn’t just a fabric order either. Polartec says it starts with one-to-one meetings while the brand is still developing the product, then continues from technical support through design. The fabric is Polartec’s. The jersey, the cut, the panels, the wind tunnel testing all belong to the brand. That matters when you’re shopping. Two brands can both say Polartec Power Dry and still hand you very different jerseys, because the fabric is only the ingredient, not the final dish.

Most mills aren’t Polartec, though. Take MOA Sport for example, the factory behind Nalini which was created by the Mantovani brothers, Vincenzo and Claudio. Nalini is the name on the jersey. MOA is the building near Verona where a lot of it gets made, along with a lot of other brands’ stuff. It’s been written for years that the kit from MOA “is often marketed as Nalini or under another brand’s insignia,” and that Rapha was one of many brands that used it for their team gear. Charles Manantan toured the factory in 2018 and put it better than I could: “Many companies tell you ‘who’s fabric’ they use… Not many can make their own fabric weaves and blends to their own internal specification.” MOA can. It makes a lot of its own chamois pads in house, and its socks start from single fibres too.

MOA Sport Production Line

Considered alongside the pad and you’ve got two stories about the same jersey. The brand’s story: a new fabric, a new name, a launch video with some slow motion, or whatever. The factory’s story: the weaves, the machines, the people who know how to run them. More often than you’d think, the company that says it created the fabric and the company that actually manufactured it are two different companies. I’d love to see more brands close that gap.

Even from inside ASSOS, Luca told me the materials aren’t the secret. More or less every competitor, brand or chamois maker, has access to the same new fabrics. “The real difference is how you use them, and in what way.”

To be fair, buying from a mill isn’t cheating. Most good kits start that way. Most fashion brands in the world starts that way. Hit up the fabric trade shows, pick fabric, make stuff. Picking the right fabric and tuning it takes real skill. The problem is the story on top, the one where the brand takes the credit and the mill vanishes.

WHERE BRANDS ACTUALLY INNOVATE

Some brands do the work, and you can tell, because you can point to it. A pad. A knit. A yarn.

Castelli buys from mills too (hello Polartec), but it’s the type of brand that keeps innovating with its own ideas. In the late 90s they built the Progetto Y pad, which they say revolutionized the chamois. Later came the Aero Race jersey. By 2013, Castelli was claiming the 4.0 saved about 12 watts at 40kph over a normal race-fit jersey, and a year later it said the 5.0 saved 20, back when most of the sport treated a jersey like a costume with a sponsor on it instead of actual performance equipment. Then Nano Flex, a five-phase treatment that Castelli says makes water bead up and roll off, while staying as warm and breathable as their regular Thermoflex when it’s dry. A coating on the fabric, not a membrane. And let’s not forget the Gabba, a piece of garm’ so good that pros on other teams started buying their own and blacking out the logos. Four different ideas from one brand.

Paul Seixas wearing a Decathlon-sponsored Gabba.

Attaquer didn’t build a new fabric. They built a new way to make the jersey, which is a different kind of idea, and the cleanest answer to everything I just said about renaming mill fabric. Attaquer says OrbKnit is knitted in a circular pattern, like a spider’s web, on Italian circular knitting machines, so the structure can change across a single piece. Mesh sections are placed using sweat-rate mapping, compression zones are built in, and it’s all woven into a single fabric. Barely any seams.

Attaquer OrbKnit jersey

I mentioned Q36.5 in part one, but they deserve a second look. The Dottore Clima line weaves graphene yarn into the fabric itself, not as a coating. It’s Q36.5’s own yarn technology. Q36.5 says graphene conducts and dissipates heat, so the fabric does some of the thermoregulation instead of leaning on evaporation like a normal jersey (that’s the brand’s claim, not a test result). A cycling brand is putting graphene into a jersey you can buy today. We need more of this.

Q36.5 Dottore Clima jersey

Assos has been mentioned a million times already, but their kit deserves a shoutout as well. AirCell is Assos’s proprietary ultralight circular knit with an open hexagon structure. AirBlock-EVO.888 is a three-layer softshell. “Proprietary” sounds like a marketing term, so I asked Luca what it means when Assos says it engineered a fabric with a supplier. When they develop a new fabric, he told me, they start from a brief: weight, breathability, stretch and price point. Then they work with the supplier to manufacture it. So the supplier isn’t just handing over a fabric, and Assos isn’t inventing one alone. It’s a collaboration.

ASSOS AirCell hexagon knit

HOW TO BUY GOOD BIBS

Everything above is only useful if it changes what you put in your cart. Here’s a small checklist that focuses on quality, and not style (that’s for a later article).

1. Read the tag. You want a maximum of 15 to 20% of Elastane. The rest should be polyamide in the good bibs. If you want cheaper bibs, go with polyester. Polyamide costs more and wears longer.

2. Find the weight. If the GSM is listed, check it against the season you’re buying for. Lower GSM for warmer seasons, higher GSM for colder seasons. If it isn’t, hold the fabric up to a light. A summer jersey should be somewhat transparent.

3. Judge the pad by density, not thickness. We’d take dense foam over thick padding every time. Look for layers of different densities with ventilation holes and a thinner central channel to take pressure off. Endurance pads are thicker with more cushion at the back, race pads more at the front (aerotuck baby!). Then flip the bibs over and look for the pad maker’s name. Not a problem if it isn’t there, but if it is, it usually means quality.

4. Check the straps and grippers. Straps should lie flat and not dig in. Wide grippers beat narrow ones. And the best grippers aren’t a separate band sewn onto the leg. They’re silicone grippers applied straight onto a cleanly cut edge, like the leg ending on Castelli’s Espresso bibs. That’s one less seam against your thigh and one less thing that can irritate.

5. Everything should fit like a second skin. Tight tight tight. No saggy spots, nothing that restricts your range of motion. And remember the pad and the shorts are a pair. Luca told me different shorts fabrics stretch differently, and “once the shorts are worn, the chamois sits differently on the body.” That’s why the same pad can feel different from one bib to the next. Try the whole bib, not the spec sheet. Loose clothing causes chafing. Tight stuff shouldn’t.

6. Look at the seams and how it’s put together. MOA’s production page describes laser cutting for clean edges, ultrasonic bonding that joins materials with high-frequency sound waves instead of needle, thread or glue, and seam-free construction that adapts to the curves of the body. Their claim is lighter garments with “imperceptible seams” and a “reduced risk of skin irritation.” That’s what I’d shop for first. A stitched seam is a ridge against your skin for six hours, and a bonded one isn’t. MOA doesn’t publish a stat for producing this way though, so call it MOA’s claim and my preference, not a test result. Overall, you want fewer seams.

7. Read the product page like a skeptic. You can’t call the brand, but you can read what it gives you. Look for specifics: a named fabric, a named pad maker, a GSM, a percentage, a test. Be wary of adjectives with nothing behind them (”proprietary” is the classic). A number beats an adjective, like the thermal mannequin test Satisfy ran in part one. And if a page can’t tell you what’s actually different about the kit, that’s your answer.

8. Know what the money buys. The cheaper stuff won’t last. The better stuff will. More money usually buys better fit, straps, grippers and pad, with diminishing returns after a point.

Next group ride, look around. Count the logos in the bunch, then think, just for a second, which of those brands are actually doing something “innovative.” Same goes for the next new-product email from (insert any cycling brand here). Notice the wording.

As much as I love kit design, we seem to forget that we don’t need as much kit as we think we do. But I know, and you know, we’ll probably keep buying it all anyway…

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Global warming seems to be a (very) controversial topic lately, but I think there’s one thing we can all agree on: summers are getting warmer and sporting events are getting tougher and tougher on all athletes. We are seeing it in tennis. We saw it during the World Cup, with those (very dumb) cooling breaks, and we are now seeing it in cycling. It seems to be the main topic of conversation for the sport right now. Especially in Grand Tours.

On stage one of the Tour de France this year, it was over 30 degrees. Now, we’re not sure if you’ve ever attempted to do an all out effort during a heatwave, but that sh*t can kill you. During that stage, UCI officials were pulling riders aside one at a time behind the start ramp and making them take the ice out of their jerseys.

What they were removing were ice socks, which is basically a pair of tights cut down, stuffed with ice cubes, tied off at both ends and shoved down the back of the collar so the melting water cools the blood running close to the skin. Most of the peloton uses them. It’s very prominent in the (professional) cyclosphere.

The rule the cyclists were “breaking” is Article 1.3.032, which basically says clothing cannot modify the rider’s morphology. It’s an anti-cheating rule. Nobody was arguing the ice was dangerous or unfair on health grounds. The concern was that a sock of ice fills in the gap behind a rider’s neck, and that’s a free watt or two (minimal gains!).

The commissaire’s explanation was that you have to draw the line somewhere. But do you?

It stuck for the first stage and quietly evaporated after that. Riders were using them again on stage 2 and nobody said a thing. Who’s going to say something when it’s 35C+?

I kept watching and it was the same story over and over again for three weeks. 36 degrees on stage three with wildfires 70km from the finish. Forecasts were touching 40 for the Carcassonne start. Pogacar called the whole cooling operation a logistical nightmare and said core temperatures were getting dangerous. Riders were dunking their forearms in tubs of iced water, eating frozen carbohydrate gels on the start line, spraying themselves with alcohol (not the drinking kind), squeezing bidons over their heads, warming down in ice vests. Tom Pidcock spent $995 on cooling mitts. Netcompany-Ineos had riders resting their forearms in water just above freezing temperature, which cooled the blood without cooling the leg muscles they’d just spent twenty minutes warming up.

The UCI had to adapt, so they relaxed the feed zone rules so teams could get bottles and ice out to riders more freely, and the race put another motorbike on the road purely to distribute ice and cold water bottles.

This is where it all gets interesting to me. The response to extreme temperatures was simply better hydration and ice distribution. Did anyone look at the clothing? The fabric? I don’t think so. I know that’s kinda hard to change in the moment, obviously, but it did have me thinking.

So we did some research and as it turns out, it isn’t that cycling stopped developing fabric. It develops plenty, actually. It’s just that all of it points one way.

WHAT THE INDUSTRY ACTUALLY CHASES

Cycling fabric R&D is pointed at watts. Almost all of it. Watts sell, so watts get funded.

Heat got marketed under comfort for decades. It was the kind of thing a mesh back panel would take care of, or making a zipper less jersey so thin it looks like a base layer and charging you $300 for it (looking at you, PNS). That all seemed to work until this summer, when heat turned into a race-deciding variable.

Running figured this out a little faster. Maybe that’s capitalism, or consumerism, if you want to call it that. They need to innovate in order to sell. It makes sense when you think about it. A runner has no bike to hide behind and no wheels to upgrade, so the shirt and the shorts, the fabric, is the only real variable there is. It’s the only thing they can buy and swap out.

Some of that is also due to simple physics though. Your cycling kit has to solve four problems at the same time. Shed heat, cut drag, kill friction, and hold its shape and position across loooong hours on the saddle.

And those four fight each other. Aero fabric is tightly woven, and tight weave means less air moving through it. Cooling fabric is open, and open is slower. Compression restricts breathability. Durability adds weight. There isn't a single fabric that wins in all four categories, so every garment ever made is a trade-off, and cycling has always settled that trade-off in favour of speed.

WHY IT WENT THIS WAY

Cyclists used to race in wool (imagine the chafing!). It absorbed everything, weighed a tonne wet, and was aerodynamically catastrophic. The chamois was real leather, rubbed with emollient (yuk) before every ride and dried carefully after.

Then in 1976, an engineer named Toni Maier brought a bike frame he designed into a wind tunnel in Zurich to get some real data, working with engineers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The frame was very radical for its time. It had teardrop tubes and it was made out of carbon fibre, which was a material so new and tightly controlled that Maier had to sign a letter with the manufacturer promising not to sell any of it to Russia (this was during the Cold War, after all). What the wind tunnel actually revealed was surprising to him. The biggest factor in aero performance wasn’t even the frame, it was the rider position, which led him to fit the world’s first cow-horn aero bars. But there was still a massive drag problem left to solve. The clothes. Those baggy wool clothes everyone raced in.

They tried a naked rider first, just to see what the body alone did in the tunnel. But that didn’t give them an answer, so it got them thinking about fabric. Maier’s wife, Eliane, was a trained textile technician, and she teamed up with a downhill ski clothing manufacturer to solve the same issue. Late in ‘76, the first ASSOS (of Switzerland) Lycra shorts came into existence.

The British-Dutch team Ti-Raleigh raced in them first, and by the end of the decade the whole peloton had switched to Lycra. Fignon won the 1984 Tour wearing ASSOS.

Fignon in 84, wearing Assos.

WHAT YOUR KIT IS (MOSTLY) MADE OF

Lycra, elastane and spandex are three names for the same fibre. They are not three different things. Lycra is DuPont’s brand name for it. Spandex is what Americans call it generically. Elastane is what shows up on a European tag. Chemically it's all the same polyurethane-based fibre, invented by a DuPont chemist named Joseph Shivers and hitting the shelves in 1958. It stretches five or six times its own length and snaps back, and it has to be at least 85 percent polyurethane to legally be called elastane. Decent bibs run 15 to 20 % of it, and the other 80 is basically a two-horse race between polyester and polyamide.

Polyester barely absorbs water. It absorbs about 1 percent of its own weight. Sweat never really gets inside the thread, it gets pulled along the channels between fibres by capillary action and dragged to the outside to evaporate. Polyester microfibre moves water 35mm in 60 seconds in lab testing. Which means it dries fast, costs less, and lasts a long time. The main downside is it runs warm on long efforts, and because the sweat sits on the surface, so does the bacteria. That is why your “cheap” jersey usually smells worse than your good (read: more expensive) one.

Polyamide is just nylon, with a nicer name. It absorbs water a little more at the fibre level but moves it off your skin faster. It’s softer, stretches better and has much higher abrasion resistance, which is why the seat panel on a great bib is almost always polyamide-heavy. It dries a tad bit slower and it costs more.

Good bibs sit at 80 to 85 percent polyamide. Cheap bibs flip that toward polyester to save money. You probably wouldn’t notice the difference in a ride or two, but you probably will after a dozen of them.

Then there’s knitted versus woven, which nobody bothers to explain and which might matter more than the fibre itself. Knit fabric is built from interlocking loops, which is why it stretches, that’s the whole mechanism behind every bib short and jersey fitting close to the body. Woven fabric is threads crossed over each other at right angles, tight and stable. It has almost no give unless you weave elastane straight into it. Almost all cycling fabric is knitted, for the obvious reason.

Luigi Bergamo, who founded Q36.5 (great brand, btw), went the other way and pushed woven into the sport. The point of it connects straight back to the heat problem. A membrane is what usually gets you wind protection on a knit fabric, and a membrane is also a near-solid barrier that kills breathability. Woven fabric blocks wind through the tightness of the weave itself, no membrane required, so you get the wind protection without paying for it in trapped heat.

The catch is that your average fabric mill isn’t set up to produce woven fabric for cycling, so the brands doing it are developing these fabrics at their own expense and passing that cost back to you. In simpler terms, it’s really expensive.

THE NUMBER NOBODY PRINTS

GSM. Grams per square metre. Cut a square metre, weigh it, and that’s the golden number. It’s measured under a standard called ISO 3801 so it compares across brands.

Summer jerseys sit at 120 to 160 GSM. Most team kits land at 140 to 160 GSM. Warm weather base layers go to 100. Thermal and winter jump to 200 to 280 and up. Bibs usually run heavier than jerseys because they need opacity and compression that a jersey simply doesn’t need. For reference, a standard year-round men’s wool suit runs around 280 to 300 GSM, so a decent chunk of your winter kit is built out of a fabric heavier than the suit hanging in your closet.

Neither end is better than the other, they just do different jobs. A 130 GSM jersey in November is a mistake. A 240 GSM in July and you’re dying (unless you’re heat training, and even then, you’re dying).

If the GSM is missing, hold the fabric up to a light. A proper summer jersey has an open knit and you should see through it. If you cannot, you will overheat. And be suspicious of any brand leading with fabric weight as their whole marketing pitch, GSM only tells you how heavy something is, not whether it's good quality. A cheap polyester knit and a premium polyamide weave can be the same GSM and perform nothing alike. If a brand won't tell you what the fabric actually is, or how it's woven, that's usually because the number is doing the work that the fabric can't.

HEAT

Your body is a bad engine. Something like 20 to 25 percent of the energy you put through the pedals actually turns into movement. The rest comes out as heat.

And that costs you real power, not just comfort. Studies have measured lactate threshold dropping around 6.5 percent when air temperature goes from 23 degrees to 32C. A simulation of a Tour mountain time trial up Alpe d’Huez, which is an insane way to test something if you ask us, put brain temperature at 39 degrees and leg muscle at 39.7.

The body’s mechanism for dealing with this is sweating, but the sweat itself doesn’t really do anything. It’s the evaporation that matters. Water turning to vapour pulls a serious amount of energy off your skin on the way out. Sweat that just sits there is dead weight, it makes you heavier and then makes you cold later when you stop.

So the entire job of a summer jersey comes down to getting sweat off your skin, spreading it out wide, and getting it to evaporate before it pools anywhere.

ABOUT THE BLACK JERSEY

Visma-Lease a Bike put two Gaudi-inspired jerseys to a fan vote before the Barcelona start. There were over 100,000 votes in three days, the black version won with 52 percent. Then the heatwave hit Spain and France and cycling's online community had some questions. Were they gonna overheat in it?

Mathieu Heijboer, head of performance at Visma, said the team wasn’t worried. They ran prototype Nimbl kits through climate chambers with simulated solar radiation and tested on thermal mannequins that sweat, tracking how fast temperature climbed under the fabric. His conclusion: colour made an insignificant difference to body temperature. Fabric structure, moisture release and fibre treatment mattered far more than whether the jersey was black or white.

That does line up with how fabric science actually works now. Darker colours do absorb more radiation, that part of physics hasn’t changed. What has changed is that modern fabric treatment, UV-resistant coatings that bounce radiation off the rider, structures that pull sweat away fast, has gotten good enough to outweigh the colour difference in a lot of cases.

Here’s the part that’s somewhat shaky. Cyclingnews pointed out that Heijboer never gave the one comparison that would have proven it for Visma’s own kit specifically, the exact same Nimbl fabric in a light version against a dark one. Without that test, you can’t say for certain this black jersey performs identically to the white one.

The riders weren’t fully convinced either. In the days leading to the Tour, they were training in the light jersey, which the team had already built as an official second kit, the Rest Day Jersey.

So take it for what it is. The broader claim, that fabric now matters more than colour, is real and backed by the industry. Whether Visma actually proved that for this specific jersey is a different question, and it’s one that’s still open.

WHAT RUNNING IS DOING ABOUT IT

Satisfy is a running brand going on its tenth year. They have recently released a new fabric called HeatCrush, built on a Japanese mesh, and it’s sweat-reactive, meaning it does nothing at all until you start sweating. When moisture rises through the fabric, the mesh pulls it outward, and heat goes with it. All of this is triggered by your own body rather than by any kind of ventilation.

They also did something cycling brands should be embarrassed about. They tested their fabric on a thermal mannequin, shot it with a FLIR camera, and published the numbers against a control group.

Data from Satisfy on HeatCrush fabric.

From a 33.8 degree baseline, HeatCrush dropped 8 degrees in thirty minutes, down to 25.8. Regular nylon dropped 5.3. Regular polyester dropped 3.1.

That’s the polyamide versus polyester thing from earlier, backed up with real numbers. Nylon nearly doubles polyester on cooling.

The Nike shirt is the other one, and if you’ve been online at all this summer you’ve seen it everywhere. The ACG Radical AirFlow NXT is a long-sleeve trail top that looks like it lost a fight with an industrial hole punch but the thing is, the holes are the technology. Funnel-shaped and tiered with dimpling on the inside, engineered around the Venturi effect so air speeds up as it passes through and gets pushed onto skin instead of just drifting by. Elbows and armpits are cut fully open. Recycled yarns, hydrophilic chemistry. It was all the craze.

Nike Radical Airflow shirt.

Caleb Olson wore it to within two minutes of the Western States course record on a hot day, in a race with temperatures over 35°C in the canyons. He described it as feeling "like stepping into a fridge," and said once it got wet, that cooling feeling just kept extending.

What's kinda funny is the timeline on all of this. Back in January 2025 Nike put out a hole-punched running shirt that looked a great deal like Satisfy's MothTech. Satisfy called them out real quick, they called it lazy, and pointed out that copying them was really just Nike admitting they'd shifted the conversation. Radical AirFlow is Nike coming back a year later with something they can actually own, proof that even a brand with infinite resources needed a smaller player to shame them into doing it properly.

The Venturi effect is a different piece of fluid dynamics than the boundary-layer tripping in aero fabric, but it’s the same category of thinking, using airflow behaviour deliberately instead of just hoping a mesh panel would do the job. Cycling’s been doing that kind of engineering for fifty years. Instead of directing air toward the body to cool you down, they worked air away from the body to make you more aero.

Polygiene StayCool is the third one, and it’s a treatment rather than a fabric on its own. Launched at Performance Days in Munich, it bonds a thermo-reactive polymer straight into the fibre during manufacturing rather than spraying it on afterward, so it sits inert until heat and moisture trigger it, then drops fabric temperature by 2 to 3 degrees. Improves wicking at the same time. Works with cotton, synthetics and recycled textiles.

It’s been buyable for over a year and it’s in some sportswear already. It’s just not in cycling at all.

WATTS

This part will sound a little crazy to us non pro's but it's still very relevant data. At 40km/hr on flat ground, drag is roughly 90 percent of everything holding you back, and 70% to 80% of that is you, not the bike, which means you don't need a new bike. Your clothes (and your position) are doing more aerodynamic work than your frame, your wheels, and your bars put together.

Fabric creates two kinds of drag. Pressure drag is the turbulent wake behind you, where air separates off your body. Skin friction drag is just air scraping across the surface as you move. It took the brands decades to figure out that smooth isn’t always faster.

Think of a golf ball. A smooth one looks faster, right? Well, it's not. Air flows over it clean and then just peels away early, leaving a big pocket of turbulence dragging behind the ball like a parachute. Dimple that surface instead and something weird happens, the air actually sticks to the ball longer before it lets go, which shrinks that drag pocket way down. Less drag, more distance. Those textured panels on your jersey sleeve are doing the exact same trick.

smooth vs dimpled golf ball

Researchers at NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, measured 8 watts saved from optimized jersey fabric alone, another 5 from the bibs, at 50km/hr. Dan Bigham, who held the Hour Record before Ganna took it off him, claims a properly fitted aero jersey saves you 5 to 15 watts over something badly fitted. Rule 28 tested their base layer under a smooth skinsuit and got 2.8 watts head-on, 7.5 at 5 degrees of yaw, at 45kph. Now obviously these kinds of watts saved don’t affect me or you day to day, but it’s still watts saved.

Deep-section wheels are worth about 5 watts. Tucking your chin is worth 10 to 15. So the guy who dropped 3 grand on some Scope Artech wheels and rolled up in an ill-fitting jersey basically has his priorities backwards.

WHERE IT ALL COLLIDES

Cycling still hasn’t cracked heat the way it’s cracked drag. Running has already shown what’s possible, sweat-reactive fabric, engineered airflow, cooling built into the weave instead of stuffed down the back of a jersey. Cycling brands need to get there too.

Because right now the cost of not solving it gets passed straight to the rider. If a fabric only fights one of the four problems well, you end up buying separate pieces to cover everything. One kit to go really fast (aero), another base layer for heat, gloves for one thing, foot warmers for another. Every extra product is another cost and a higher barrier to just getting into this sport properly. A brand that actually solves heat the way it's solved drag isn't just making a better product. It's saving you from having to buy four different products to do one job.

Part two gets into the stuff actually touching your skin. The chamois nobody thinks about until it's wrong. The brands already building smarter fabric into real kit right now. And the ones outside cycling entirely who are doing things with fabric the sport hasn't even thought to ask for yet.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

BEFORE WE START

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

LEFT TURNS // 004 — WHO MADE THAT KIT Every WorldTour and ProTeam kit supplier for 2026. Men and women. In one place.

MOODY BOARDS // 005 — GIRO D’ITALIA No explanation. No context. Just the feeling.

BREAKAWAY // 005 — Cycling Has a Visibility Problem Ben Healy has 105,000 followers. Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. That gap is not about talent. How fashion became the entry point for every sport that cracked the culture problem — and why cycling has not run that playbook yet.

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The Giro is by far my favourite race in the calendar. Not only for what it is, but for what it means. For what it represents. My family is from Fossacesia. A small town on the Adriatic coast of Abruzzo. My wife and I got married there a few years back. Over the holidays a few years ago, my mom’s uncle told me that growing up, him and his brother used to cycle all over those roads. His brother got good enough to race. He apparently turned pro in the fifties. Apparently even did the Giro. I was never able to find anything to confirm it online, so we are just going to have to believe it. Fossacesia is in the same region as the Blockhaus, the majestic climb that defines the first week of the Giro every time the race comes through the region.

The love for this sport did not come from nowhere. It came from somewhere specific.

I grew up in Montreal. Born here. Live here. But I grew up Italian. My parents, my sister, my nonno and my nonna, we spoke Italian at home, we ate Italian, our whole culture was Italian even though we lived in a French-Canadian city. I even went to Italian school on Saturday mornings. My whole circle of friends grew up the same way. We have always identified as being Italian over Canadian.

Growing up though, soccer had every ounce of my attention. Played it every day, watched AS Roma on the weekends, still do. I idolized the Azzurri. Totti, Maldini, Nesta. The golden age of Italian soccer. Cycling came way later in my life, after wrecking my knee a few times and realizing that soccer was not worth playing anymore. Surgery can do that to you. Once I got my first road bike and some friends did the same, everything changed. The first race I ever watched was the Giro. I did not really understand the sport at that point yet (especially the tactics of it) but I fell in love with how Italy was being portrayed through the race. How they spoke about the food, the wine, the weird little stories to fill up TV time. The country that mostly shaped who I am being shown to me through a camera on the back of a motorcycle at speed. The light. The roads. The crowds on hairpins. Italy is not just the backdrop. It’s the whole point.

The Giro d’Italia was born in 1909 as a marketing scheme. That’s the honest version. La Gazzetta dello Sport was a struggling sports newspaper in Milan, printed on pink paper because pink was the cheapest stock available. Their rival, the Corriere della Sera, had used an automobile race to drive circulation and it had worked. The Tour de France had launched in 1903 for the same reason, built by a French paper called L’Auto to sell copies. Tullo Morgagni, the editor of La Gazzetta, saw what a national race could do and sent a telegram to his cycling editor in Venice. Four words in Italian. Senza indugio, necessità obbliga. Without delay, necessity obliges.

Tullo Morgagni

They had no money. The paper could barely make payroll. They announced the race anyway, across seven columns on the front page, then sent an accountant named Primo Bongrani around Italy with a hat asking for donations. Even the Corriere della Sera, their direct rival, gave them 3,000 lire. Roughly two months of a working person’s salary at the time.

On May 13, 1909, at 2:53 in the morning, 127 riders left from outside La Gazzetta’s offices in Milan and attempted stage one out of eight. The first stage was 397 kilometers to Bologna. The roads were mostly dirt. The bikes weighed as much as small children. A mass crash happened before dawn, less than two kilometers from the start. The first ever stage winner was Dario Beni and he won it in roughly fourteen hours. That is the beginning of the Giro.

Dario Beni

The Italy we know now was very different than the Italy that was around when the Giro started. As a unified nation, the country was only 48 years old. Before 1861 there was no Italy, per se. There was the Kingdom of Sardinia in the north, the Papal States in the center, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south, and a collection of duchies and foreign-controlled territories that happened to share a peninsula and a language. The Risorgimento had stitched them together on paper. On the ground the divisions were still raw. A factory worker in Milan and a farmer in Calabria shared a flag and almost nothing else. To the first Giro fans, riders were not Italian. They were from Asti. From Novi Ligure. From Cittiglio. The region, or commune, came before the nation. It always had.

Morgagni understood this and routed the race deliberately. Not just through the north, where the fans and the passable roads were, but all the way through Italy. Down to Naples and back. Through towns that had never seen a bicycle race. Through regions that had no reason to feel connected to anything happening in Milan. But the People came out, and they came out in numbers. Farmers. Merchants. Fishermen. Standing on dirt roads watching riders from their region and riders from places they had never been to moving through the same landscape together. The Giro did not set out to unify Italy. It set out to sell newspapers. Somehow, it managed to do both.

By 1911, just the third edition, the organizers moved the start and finish to Rome to celebrate Italy’s 50th anniversary of unification. The race had become something much bigger than a sporting event in just two years.

The pink jersey came in 1931, twenty-two years after the first race. The maglia rosa. The reason it is pink has nothing to do with romance or intention. La Gazzetta printed on pink paper because it was the cheapest stock available at that time. That is it. A budget decision at a broke newspaper became the colour of the most recognizable jersey in the sport. It just happens, the way the best Italian things tend to.

Then came the war. Two of them. The Giro stopped during both. When it came back in 1946 the country was rubble and chaos. The roads were craters. Italy was trying to figure out what it was now, what it stood for, who was in charge. And into all of that walked two cyclists who could not stand each other and could not stop racing one another.

Fausto Coppi was from Piedmont. Secular, precise, obsessive about diet and training in a way nobody had been before. Cold in person, extraordinary on a bike. He approached the sport like a science while everyone else was still treating it like a suffering session. He was a hero of the industrial north.

Gino Bartali was from Tuscany. Conservative, deeply Catholic, blessed personally by three popes. He believed suffering on a bike was a form of devotion. Warm in public and suspicious in private. The rural south venerated him. They were teammates on the national team and barely spoke.

Coppi and Bartali in the Italian Alps.

Bartali booked hotel rooms next to Coppi’s and managed to go through his room for bottles, phials and tubes before some stages looking for evidence of doping. During a mountain stage of the 1946 Giro, Coppi drank from a glass phial mid-race and threw it into the bushes. Bartali retrieved it, put it in an envelope and sent it to a lab. It came back as a French tonic available to the public without a prescription. At the 1948 World Championship in Valkenburg they were both in the lead group on the final lap. Neither would ride for the other. Both climbed off the bike rather than help the other one win. The gold medal went to a Belgian.

The writer Dino Buzzati covered the 1949 Giro for the Corriere della Sera having never written about cycling before. He used military language. Achilles and Hector. Two men carrying the weight of a divided country across three weeks of mountain roads while Italy watched from the roadside and chose a side to root for.

Coppi left Bartali by eleven minutes on a single stage. Cuneo to Pinerolo. Eleven minutes. Coppi was the north. Progress, industry, the secular future. Bartali was the south. Tradition, faith, the old Italy. A country still trying to convince itself it was one thing watched these two men and picked a side. Most of them never switched and the rivalry was never resolved.

Fiorenzo Magni in 1956, crashed and broke his collarbone mid-race, his right arm completely useless, no way to grip the handlebar. He looped an inner tube around the bars and bit down on the rubber with his teeth, absorbing every cobble and every pothole through his jaw for the rest of the stage because abandoning was never a consideration. He finished. Not for the stage win. Not for the time. For the race. For the jersey. Because that is what the Giro asks of you and Magni was not the kind of man who said no to that.

The famous Magni Bite

Chris Froome in 2018. Down three minutes with three days left, which usually is unrecoverable, attacked alone on the first climb of Stage 19 and rode eighty kilometers through the Dolomites completely by himself. Simon Yates, who had worn the maglia rosa for thirteen consecutive stages that year, lost over thirty-eight minutes that afternoon. He also lost the jersey.

Seven years later, at the 2025 Giro, Simon Yates came back to the Colle delle Finestre. The same climb. He attacked on the gravel roads near the top, dropped everyone, set a new record up the mountain and won the race overall by nearly four minutes. The Finestre had defined his career once already. He went back and redefined it himself. Its hard not to be romantic when you hear stories like that.

The Dolomites do this. They are not like any other mountains in cycling. They come at you in walls. Short, brutal, relentless climbs that strip away tactics and team support and leave only the rider and whatever they have left. And the crowds. There is no crowd in cycling like a Giro crowd. They line hairpins in the middle of the night to be there at dawn when the race comes through. They paint the roads. They build shrines on the mountainside. They do not watch the Giro. They inhabit it.

The highest point of each Giro is called the Cima Coppi, named after the great Fausto Coppi. The first rider to crest it takes the award. Coppi won this race five times. He got sick after a hunting trip in Africa in 1959. His doctors could not figure out what was wrong. Nobody thought to test for malaria. He was a European cycling champion. He’s been through hell multiple times. It did not cross their minds. He died on January 2, 1960. He was forty years old. Every year at the top of the hardest climb his name gets painted on the road and the peloton rides over it.

In 2023, the Giro started from Fossacesia Marina. Stage one. A 19.6-kilometre time trial along the Costa dei Trabocchi to Ortona, past the trabocchi, the fishing platforms built on stilts above the Adriatic that have been there for centuries. Won by Remco Evenepoel, who took the first maglia rosa of that edition in the town where I got married. The town my family grew up in. A few kilometers from the mountain my great-uncles rode after the war for no other reason than because it was there and they had bikes and they were alive.

1 of 23 Trabocchi left on the Adriatic coast in Abruzzo.

The 109th edition starts today. It begins in Bulgaria before crossing into the south of Italy, moving north through the Apennines, into the Alps, into the Dolomites, finishing in Rome. The Blockhaus is on the route. Stage seven. Rest assured, we will be on the couch in Montreal, in a city that is not Italy, but in a home that always was.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 004 — The Kids from Piazza San Babila

Milan, 1983. A generation decided the most radical thing they could do was refuse politics entirely. No manifesto. Just dress better than everyone else. What the Paninari understood about clothes as ideology, and why cyclists have been running the same logic ever since.

LEFT TURNS // 003 — What If Cycling Had a Creative Director?

Crystal Palace did it. Como 1907 did it. The Cleveland Cavaliers did it. Every sport with cultural ambitions figured this out already. What happens when cycling finally makes the call.

BREAKAWAY // 003 — Café Raids

Tour riders stopping mid-race to drink wine, eat at cafés, and disappear back into the peloton with glass bottles stuffed in their pockets. The history of la chasse à la canette and what cycling gave up when it decided to grow up.

No affiliate links. No paid placements. No sponsored content. Everything we write about and put in front of you is either something we genuinely believe in or something we believe the culture needs to be talking about. That has always been the deal.

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Ben Healy won a Tour de France stage in July 2025. Wore the yellow jersey for two days. Was written up by NSS Magazine as a fashion icon. Talks about his Issey Miyake trousers in interviews. Posts vacation dumps from Florence and Venice between races that feel like a Dua Lipa feed. Twenty-four years old. Genuinely one of the most interesting athletes in cycling.

He has roughly 105,000 Instagram followers.

Lewis Hamilton has over 40 million. An estimated six figures per sponsored post. When he announced his move to Ferrari, Ferrari’s stock price went up more than 10 percent the same day. Dior. Tommy Hilfiger. Lululemon. Every major fashion house has found its way to him.

The gap between those two numbers is not a talent gap. Not a style gap. Not even a sport gap. It is a visibility gap. And cycling built that gap itself.

We have been thinking about this problem since reading an article over at Bicicletta de Montaigne writing about the UCI’s structural problems (go subscribe). But while Catherine was writing about the financial collapse, we kept coming back to something running parallel to that idea. A conversation about visibility. About why cycling, with all of this great raw material, cannot break through to the audiences that tennis and F1 and basketball have built. About how fashion, whether cycling likes it or not, is one of the most powerful tools any sport has for building cultural presence.

The playbook already exists. It just lives within other sport leagues.

The NBA tunnel walk started as nothing. Players walking from the arena entrance to the locker room before games. Nobody was photographing it. Then in 2005 David Stern introduced a dress code, which backfired in the best possible way. Players who had been wearing whatever they wanted suddenly had rules to push against. LeBron James showed up in Thom Browne. Russell Westbrook wore skirts. The short walk from the door to the locker room became the most watched fifteen seconds in the sport.

Image via Vogue.com

Ian Pierno started @LeagueFits in 2018, an Instagram account dedicated to documenting NBA tunnel fashion. He struggled to find content at first but today the account has over a million followers. The NBA took notice and started building tunnel content into their own channels. When Kyle Kuzma posted a photo in a $3,000 Rick Owens puffer it sold out within days. When Shai Gilgeous-Alexander wore Fear of God, searches for the brand spiked the following week. The tunnel walk became a product launch platform, a cultural moment, and a new fan acquisition tool all at once.

Pierno said it plainly: if you are a new fan of basketball, maybe the statistics go over your head. But you can relate to the cool outfits. Fashion became the entry point.

F1 ran a different play with the same result. Hamilton spent a decade turning the paddock into a version of the red carpet. Custom looks for every race weekend. At the 2024 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix his outfits transitioned from a full whitish-silver fit to a full red one over four days to mark his move from Mercedes to Ferrari. He co-chaired the Met Gala. Launched his own streetwear brand. Hamilton did not just become a fashion figure. He became proof of concept that a driver could be a global cultural personality and that personality could pull massive new audiences into the sport. Women now make up around 40 percent of F1’s global audience, up from around 8 percent in 2017. There is a huge surge in North American audiences. That shift did not happen because the cars got faster. It happened because of the imagery around the sport.

Tennis is doing it right now in real time and the ATP is not even pretending it is accidental. They quadrupled their fashion marketing budget. Built ATP Styling Studios, giving players one-on-one sessions with fashion industry professionals. Manufactured tunnel walk moments at Indian Wells this year, photographing Taylor Fritz, Alexander Zverev, and Andrey Rublev walking in like it was a runway. Carlos Alcaraz is with Louis Vuitton. Jannik Sinner carries a custom Gucci bag on court at every tournament. Jack Draper is with Burberry. The ATP looked at the NBA and said we want that.

Tennis players worked with former GQ fashion director Mabolaji Dawodu to create custom looks for the Tunnel.

Their SVP of marketing said it out loud: there is a clear intersection between tennis and fashion for our fans. We see this as an opportunity to bring fans who might be following the sport more casually deeper into the fold.

Cycling has not said this yet. Not officially. Not ever actually. Not with a budget behind it.

At the end of an F1 race the drivers emerge from the cockpit looking touched up. At the end of a cycling stage the riders look like they have been through a war. Sunburn, salt stains, road rash, the thousand-yard stare at the finish line. We love that imagery. It makes them look human in a way no other sport does. But that imagery only reaches people who are already watching. It does not travel. It does not pull anyone in from the outside.

New audiences do not enter a sport through its hardest moments. They enter through the ones around it. The tunnel walk. The paddock. The ATP arrivals corridor at Indian Wells. Every sport that has built a real cultural crossover found its door in the same place. Not the competition. The moment before it or after it. What the athlete wears when the helmet comes off. What they look like walking into a hotel lobby in Florence the morning before a stage. Those moments exist in cycling every single week. Nobody is there with a camera. Nobody has a stylist on the phone.

The peloton races through the most photographed cities in the world. Paris. Florence. Milan. San Remo. Liege. Brussels. The backdrops are free and they are extraordinary. The sport produces images that look like they were art directed. A rider in kit climbing a mountain in the Dolomites. The peloton through the Arenberg cobbles in morning mist. The finish line on the Champs-Elysees. No other sport drops its athletes into visual environments like this on a weekly basis. And then those athletes disappear into a team bus and nobody documents what happens next.

Image from the talented Jared Gruber.

The cycling jersey is already a fashion object. The Molteni orange. The Mapei squares. The Bianchi celeste. Pas Normal Studios, MAAP, Rapha. The crossover is happening from the product side. Brands are doing the work. But a jersey on a hanger in a Copenhagen studio is not the same as Ben Healy wearing Issey Miyake trousers at a café in Florence after a rest day. One is a product. The other is a cultural moment. The difference is a photographer and an intention.

And the raw material is already there.

Michael Matthews has been that guy his entire career. The jewellery. The clothes. The cars. The peloton gave him the nickname Bling before Instagram existed, which tells you everything. This was not a brand exercise. Not a stylist. Not a team social media strategy that decided fashion content performed well. It was just who he was, and the people who rode next to him every day noticed it first. Thirty-four years old now. Grand Tour stages in all three races. Green jersey at the Tour. And 121,000 followers on a platform built for exactly the kind of person he is. The handle is @bling90. The identity was there before anyone thought to document it. It is still waiting.

Mathieu van der Poel is arguably the greatest classics rider alive right now, with the kind of presence that fashion campaigns are built around. He jokes with Pogacar on Instagram after Milan-San Remo. Posts the GOAT emoji under his rival’s victory post. Genuinely a good, funny dude online. Just over a million followers. In any other sport at his level of dominance that number would be 10 million.

Tadej Pogacar is the best cyclist alive (potentially ever). Three Tour de France wins, two Giro d’Italia wins, world champion. 3 million followers. Patrick Mahomes, the best NFL quarterback of his generation, has nearly 7 million on Instagram alone and a multi-decade State Farm deal that runs during the Super Bowl. Pogacar has won more in his sport than Mahomes has in his and has less than half the platform.

A significant portion of the WorldTour peloton lives in Monaco. Pogacar. Michael Matthews. The same square kilometre of the Riviera that houses Formula 1 drivers, tennis players, hedge fund managers, and fashion people. The crossover is not theoretical. It is happening on a Tuesday morning over coffee. Pogacar and Carlos Sainz are neighbours. They ride together on recovery days. Sainz describes it plainly: even on Pogacar's easy days, he is going flat out just to keep up. In March 2026 Sainz drove from Monaco to San Remo to watch Pogacar win Milan-San Remo and was there on the podium to hand him the trophy. The best cyclist in the world and a Formula 1 driver, sharing espressos and a stage finish. Nobody is leaning into that story.

Sainz said it after the race: we are very good friends, and seeing him win the Sanremo here in person, after all he worked for, is a source of pride and honor. He is a top guy. Humble, down to earth. I’d never come to see a race live before. But for him I came.

That is the door. Right there. The elite athlete subculture of Monaco is already integrated. The friendships are real. The shared world is real. The infrastructure to broadcast any of it to the people who would care does not exist.

One rider at the 2025 Tour de France had 1,709 followers. A WorldTour professional competing in the biggest bike race in the world. He told a journalist he might need to crash to get more followers. That sentence should be on a billboard at UCI headquarters.

So why is this happening?

A few reasons.

Cycling has historically treated marketing as an afterthought. Team budgets go to riders, staff, equipment. That’s it. The cultural extension of what their riders represent has not been part of it. Riders spend most of their season in kit or in recovery. The arrival, the hotel lobby, the transfer between races, the post-race cafe stop. These moments happen and disappear. Nobody is photographing them with intent.

The sport has always worn its indifference to image like a badge. Suffering is the point. Looking good is not. Fashion has been treated as peripheral at best, embarrassing at worst. That attitude is the obstacle.

And most importantly: nobody has built the infrastructure. There is no @LeagueFits for cycling. No ATP Styling Studio equivalent. No official channel dedicated to what riders wear when they are not racing. These things do not exist yet. That is not a problem. That is an opportunity.

Here is what fixing this looks like.

Ben Healy does not need to change anything about who he is. He needs a photographer following him for a week during the Tour and a team social media strategy that understands his Issey Miyake trousers are content. The vacation dumps between race days are already the right instinct. They just need to be documented with the same seriousness as the on-bike footage.

Image via Ben Healy’s insta.

Michael Matthews has an identity built for this. A decade of peloton reputation. You do not invent that. You film it. You follow him through Milan before San Remo and you turn it into a proper editorial shoot alongside the ride content. The raw material is already there. It just needs production.

The proof that the appetite is there already exists. Bas Tietema started a YouTube channel in 2019 with two friends. Three people filming themselves at the Tour de France, handing pizza to riders, messing around on the road. No strategy. No sponsor deck. That channel became the Unibet Rose Rockets, a UCI ProTeam now employing 85 people including a 20-person media team. They have a fanbase called the purple army that shows up at races in purple jackets. At the Amstel Gold Race they filled an entire corner with thousands of supporters. Their most watched video of the season was one where the whole team DNF’d. Not a victory. A failure. Because the fans were so invested in the story that the failure mattered as much as the win. Tietema has said his goal is not just to reach the WorldTour but to build the biggest fanbase in cycling. Nobody else in cycling has made that their primary objective. And they are proving it works.

The women’s peloton has the same problem and an even bigger opportunity. Demi Vollering won Strade Bianche in 2025, finishing alone in the Piazza del Campo in Siena, covered in white dust, every centimetre of that finish photographed by the best cycling photographers alive. 80,000 Instagram followers. Elisa Longo Borghini has won the Giro d’Italia Women two years running, Paris-Roubaix, Tour of Flanders. She is Italian, races in Italy, finishes on roads that look like paintings. 80,000 followers. The visual conditions are perfect. The athletes are extraordinary. The infrastructure to connect those two things to the outside world does not exist. The WNBA built a fashion moment in a single season when the right players arrived and someone decided to document it properly. Women’s cycling has the riders. It is waiting for the same decision.

At the sport level, the UCI and race organisers need to create the conditions. Formal pre-race arrival content. A designated photographer at every Grand Tour start capturing what riders wear off the bike. An official channel dedicated to it. This is not expensive. @LeagueFits was started by one person with a phone. The barrier is not budget. It is intention.

The brands are already paying attention. Richard Mille, Breitling, and Tudor have all moved into cycling in the last three years. Breitling sponsors the Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team. Tudor is the official timekeeper of the Giro d'Italia. In April 2025 IUMAN, the Italian men's underwear brand formerly known as Intimissimi Uomo, signed a deal to put their name on the Maglia Rosa itself. An underwear brand on one of the most coveted jersey in cycling is not an obvious move. It tells you exactly who thinks cycling's audience is worth reaching right now. These are not brands that make uninformed bets. They go where the audience is going. Or more precisely, where they believe the audience is about to go.

The fashion brand side will follow the rest if the infrastructure exists. Sinner did not go looking for Gucci. Gucci went looking for Sinner because the ATP had built the platform that made him visible as a fashion figure. Cycling has riders who are equally compelling. Build the conditions and the brands will come. The brands always follow the audience.

The target is the person who does not yet know they care about cycling. The person who found F1 through Hamilton’s paddock looks. Who started watching the NBA because @LeagueFits showed up on their feed. Who is currently following tennis because Alcaraz looks good carrying a Louis Vuitton bag.

That person exists for cycling too. They just have not been given a door.

Ben Healy in Issey Miyake trousers at a cafe in Florence is the door. Pogacar and Sainz sharing espressos in Monaco and a podium in San Remo is the door. The peloton winding through the streets of Milan on race morning is the door.

The raw material is extraordinary. The sport has just never treated it that way.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.

You can follow us on Instagram here but in its purest and most beautiful form this is a newsletter, something to slow your timeline down.

Before we get into it

GRAVITYHILL is free to read and always will be. But if you are getting something out of it, a subscription goes a long way toward keeping this independent.

In case you missed it, here is what we have been working on:

BREAKAWAY // 002 — A Sharpie, a Hack, and 150 Years of Castelli

A Norwegian rider blacked out a logo with a marker in 2009. Castelli turned it into a product. Then half the peloton showed up at Milan-San Remo in one. How the most important cycling garment of the last twenty years started as a fix and became infrastructure.

THE DROP // VOL. 002

A playlist that is a little all over the place and completely selfish. Songs we have been living with for years. For the last few indoor training sessions before the roads open up.

FEEDZONE // 003 — The Vest Situation

The piece of kit nobody photographs and everybody reaches for. Six brands that actually figured out how to make the best version of it.

No affiliate links. No paid placements. No sponsored content. Everything we write about and put in front of you is either something we genuinely believe in or something we believe the culture needs to be talking about. That has always been the deal.

If that sounds like your kind of newsletter, you know what to do.

Subscribe now

They were not revolutionaries. And that was kind of the whole point.

Before the Paninari, there were the barricades. The 1970s in Milan meant the Years of Lead. Students throwing Molotov cocktails, arguing about Marx, wearing ideology like a badge. Then the eighties arrived and something shifted. A new generation decided the most radical thing they could do was refuse all of it. No politics. No manifesto. Just dress better than everyone else.

They called themselves the Paninari. Named after a sandwich bar in Piazza Liberty. Sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, gathering on Saturday afternoons in Moncler puffers, Levi’s 501s, Timberland boots. No manifesto. No politics. Just the precise articulation of taste as a worldview. A generation celebrating economic optimism after a decade of violence and austerity. Dressing well was not shallow. It was a declaration that things were better now. That joy was available. That you could just live.

A reporter sticks a microphone in a kid’s face and asks what he stands for. The kid lists his outfit, brand by brand, and at the end says: do you want to know the price as well?

That kid single handedly invented hype culture. He just didn’t know it yet.

Every other youth subculture of that era expressed itself through music or politics, or both. Punks had the Clash. Autonomists had the barricades. The Paninari had Stone Island. The first subculture not anchored to music or politics. Pure aesthetic identity. The brand on your back was the belief system. If the British Mods of the early 1960s were the first subculture to introduce obsessive attention to fashion detail into youth culture, the Paninari extended that obsession to brand and luxury and predicted hype culture by twenty years. The High Numbers released a single in 1964 as a detailed handbook of modernist fashion. Twenty years later the Pet Shop Boys exported the Paninari concept worldwide with a song named after them. The pattern is the same. A subculture so specific and so coherent it forced the outside world to pay attention. The proof of how deep it ran: look at the Pony Express riders delivering packages around Milan in the 1980s. They were delivery workers, and yet the aesthetic was identical to the Paninari. Sportswear and workwear elevated to cult status by proximity to the scene. That is not fashion. That is a movement.

Massimo Osti in his office.

Massimo Osti, a Bolognese designer who thought of clothes like an engineer would, built C.P. Company in 1971 and Stone Island in 1982. Technical outerwear. Military references recut for the street. Fabrics that did things other fabrics could not. The Paninari adopted both these brands immediately. Not because a magazine said so. Because the clothes were genuinely extraordinary. Functional. Obsessive in construction. Not trying to be fashion and therefore more fashionable than anything that was. The hierarchy was strict. One member of the scene put it plainly: “at first we wore Dolomite puffers, then since everyone had one, even the tackiest of people, we switched to the mandatory orange Moncler”. That sentence contains the entire logic of how taste works. The moment something becomes available to everyone it stops meaning anything. You move on. You find the next thing. You protect the vibe. Another style move was to wear the watch above the cuff. Not under it. Above it, over the sleeve, visible at all times. A gesture of deliberate ostentation traced directly back to Gianni Agnelli, who had been doing it for decades. The Paninari were not inventing a new attitude. They were inheriting one from the most stylish man in Italian industry and wearing it on a Saturday afternoon outside a sandwich bar.

Gianni Agnelli.

Osti said he wanted to design for science, not fashion. The Paninari took his research and turned it into a uniform. A subculture built around technical obsession that its own creator never intended for them. Neither of them planned it that way. That is usually how the best things happen.

The movement burned bright, but brief. By the end of the decade it was over, dissolved by changing politics and shifting taste. But the brands survived. Stone Island went to English football terraces first, then to hip-hop, then to Supreme, then got sold to Moncler for 1.15 billion euros. C.P. Company went to casuals, then to Palace, then to Manchester City. What’s amazing is that the shops that now carries these brands, also carries Pas Normal Studios, Rapha and MAAP. The same shops where cyclists shop. That journey from Milan to the terraces was not accidental. The UK football casuals of the 1980s and the Paninari were running the same logic from different cities. Tribalism expressed through brands. Identity declared through what you wore. British youths adopted Stone Island and C.P. Company directly from the Paninari, integrating them into a culture that was equally serious about what the badge on your chest meant. The connection between those two worlds explains exactly how a subculture born in a Milanese sandwich bar ended up on the backs of Manchester City fans four decades later.

We have not seen the blending of these brands in a physical store yet but scroll through any serious online retailer right now and you will find Pas Normal Studios sitting next to Stone Island sitting next to Moncler Grenoble. Different worlds, same page, no curatorial note explaining why. The person who built that product assortment understood something. The customer who scrolls past all three in the same session understands it too. The crossover is not accidental and it is not new. It is the same logic the Paninari were running in 80’s, playing out forty years later on a different kind of wheel. The Paninari were not just brand loyal. They were ideologically committed. Taste was the worldview. The brand on your back was the belief system. Declaring something about who you were, what you valued, who you wanted to be understood by. The clothes were the manifesto. Us cyclists do the same thing. The rider who chooses MAAP over a generic kit is not just making a performance decision. They are making a cultural statement. Even the bike you choose says something about who you are. The brands that earn that loyalty in cycling do it the same way Osti did it in 1982. By being genuinely serious about what they make. By treating the garment as an object worth obsessing over. By having a point of view that goes beyond the product. PNS, MAAP, Castelli, Q36.5, Rapha. These brands speak a language that cyclists who care about the aesthetics of the sport understand immediately. The ones that do not speak that language get ignored regardless of price. That is not consumerism. That is ideology.

Those kids understood something that cycling culture is only now fully articulating. Technical outerwear worn with intention is a complete aesthetic statement. The Moncler puffer was not just warm. It was a position. The Stone Island badge was not just branding. It was a declaration. They were not dressing for function. They were dressing to be understood by the right people and invisible to everyone else.

Sound familiar?

The rider in the full aero Castelli kit at the cafe stop is doing the same thing. The gravel rider in the faded Cafe du Cycliste jersey. The commuter with the Brooks saddle and the deliberate restraint of a black Rapha everything. We are all Paninari. We just ride bikes instead of Vespas.

The real difference though is that cycling actually requires the performance. The Paninari wore technical outerwear as a pose. We wear it and then ride six hours. All of it has to work. Function earns the form here. That is what makes cycling culture’s version of this more interesting than the original.

There’s a story where a kid named Massimo got tired of the fact that the only iron-on patches available with cartoon characters were designed for girls. So he started drawing an angry Donald Duck on the thighs of his Levi’s 501s with a marker. By hand. The most expensive subculture of its generation had a DIY streak running underneath it the whole time. When the market does not give you what you want you make it yourself. The signal matters more than the budget. Cyclists have always known this. The stickers on the helmet. The custom bar tape. The decal set that makes a stock frame look like something personal. The rider who sands the logo off their saddle because the colorway was wrong. Small acts of individual expression inside a sport that otherwise dresses everyone the same. The Paninari drew on their jeans. We put stickers on our lids. Same instinct. Different road.

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BREAKAWAY // 002 — A Sharpie, a Hack, and 150 Years of Castelli

A Norwegian rider blacked out a logo with a marker in 2009. Castelli turned it into a product. Then half the peloton showed up at Milan-San Remo in one. How the most important cycling garment of the last twenty years started as a fix and became infrastructure.

THE DROP // VOL. 002

A playlist that is a little all over the place and completely selfish. Songs we have been living with for years. For the last few indoor training sessions before the roads open up.

FEEDZONE // 003 — The Vest Situation

The piece of kit nobody photographs and everybody reaches for. Six brands that actually figured out what a vest is supposed to do

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Today a WorldTour rider knows exactly what is in every bottle coming through the car window. Grams of carbohydrate. Milligrams of sodium. Timing mapped to the km. Nothing left to chance. Nothing improvised.

A hundred years ago, a rider in the same race would stop at a roadside bar, lean his bike against the wall, walk inside, and order wine.

Not as a protest. Not as a bit. Because he was thirsty and the café was there.

The very first Tour de France in 1903 set the tone immediately. Maurice Garin, the man who won it, rode with a cigarette in his mouth and stopped at bars along the route to refuel. Not once. Regularly. He credited wine, hot chocolate, and oysters as essential to his preparation. Cycling’s inaugural champion was essentially running on a moving picnic.

The following year, 1904 winner Henri Cornet fuelled himself on champagne, hot chocolate, tea, and rice pudding. Every single day. Cornet was nineteen years old and is still the youngest Tour winner in history. He won on a diet that would get a modern rider pulled from the race by their nutritionist before the first mountain stage.

In those early years the Tour took no responsibility for feeding the riders at all. They were expected to make their own arrangements. Breakfasts at cafes. Bread from farms. Whatever they could carry or find. The race went straight through towns and the towns were part of the race.

Wine was fuel. Beer was hydration. Champagne sat somewhere between the two. And alcohol was often a safer bet than water. This is not a joke. Rural France in the early 1900s had no guarantee of a clean supply. Village water came from whatever was available. Streams. Old pipes. Wells that had not been tested by anyone. No treatment. No regulation. Nothing standing between what went in the ground and what came out the tap. Fermentation killed what was in it. A bottle of wine that had been through that process was genuinely safer to drink mid-stage than a cup of water from a roadside pump that nobody could vouch for. Riders were not being reckless. They were being practical. The science backed them up even if they did not know it yet.

By the 1960s the practice had its own name. La chasse à la canette. The can hunt. Louis Malle documented it in his 1962 film Vive le Tour, calling the drinking raid one of the most important moments of the race. The footage is something. Riders flying off bikes, shouldering through cafe doors, ransacking the bar for wine and beer and champagne, anything with calories, then disappearing back onto the road with glass bottles stuffed in jersey pockets and silver foil champagne tops catching the light.

They did not pay. The Tour organisers settled the bill at the end of the race. The bar owner got reimbursed and got a story he would retell for the rest of his life. The riders got back in the peloton ten minutes down and made it up. That was the deal.

Team leaders did not even do the raiding themselves. That was the domestique’s job. The captain would bark the order and the raiding party formed around him. Fetching the bottles was part of the service. One of the unwritten perks of being a leader on Tour. It was never your round.

The story that captures all of this perfectly happened in 1935. Stage 17. Pau to Bordeaux. Baking July heat through southwestern France. Somewhere along the route, spectators had set up a table by the roadside loaded with beer for the peloton. An offering. A gesture. Completely irresistible in the circumstances.

Almost the entire peloton stopped.

One rider did not. Julien Moineau drifted quietly away from the group as everyone else reached for a glass, slipped into a gap, and put his head down. He had organized his own water stops in advance. Some people have suggested he may have also organized the beer table, though he never admitted it. He won the stage by fifteen minutes and thirty-three seconds. One of the largest winning margins in Tour history. The whole peloton, outmaneuvered by a cold beer and a plan.

Café raids faded slowly. Not because they were banned outright, but because everything around them changed. Team cars became common. Feeding zones standardized. Nutrition science arrived. Gatorade was developed at the University of Florida in 1965. Cycling took a while to catch up, characteristically, but it got there. Sponsors wanted control. Television wanted predictability. The race tightened.

By the time gels and energy drinks took over, stopping at a café mid-stage felt unthinkable. Dangerous. Out of sync with what cycling had become. The café was no longer part of the course. It became something you visit after the ride.

Something was gained though. Speeds went up. Today’s riders consume upward of 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour, more than double what the science recommended a decade ago. Their guts literally retrained to absorb that much fuel. What the human body can do across three weeks of racing in 2025 is not the same sport as what Garin and Cornet were doing on unpaved roads with wine in their pockets. The results are not up for debate.

But something was lost too. Not alcohol. Informality.

The café raid belonged to a moment when cycling had not fully separated itself from the world it moved through. The race accepted interruption. Riders adapted to what was there instead of eliminating every variable. Towns were not just backdrop. They were infrastructure. Spectators were not watching from behind barriers. They were handing over bottles and laying out beer tables and settling up with the bar owner at the end.

That image feels foreign now. Modern cycling is a controlled environment. Every variable monitored. Nothing improvised. The race exists inside a bubble the sport spent a century building and the bubble works. There is no romance in bonking because you thought vibes were enough.

The café raid stories are not a counterargument to any of that. They are context. Texture. A reminder that the first Tour winner stopped at bars with a cigarette in his mouth and won anyway. That a nineteen-year-old fuelled himself on champagne and rice pudding and became the youngest champion in history. That an entire peloton once stopped for a cold beer and got beaten by fifteen minutes by the one rider who did not.

Most of us are not stopping mid-ride to grab a beer (maybe, sometimes). We are stopping after. Bikes leaned up outside. Shoes still on. One drink turning into two. Talking about the ride while the body comes back down.

That is where the café raid lives now. Not as a tactic. As a tone.

Cycling grew up. It got faster and more precise and more demanding and all of that is correct. Cycling optimized everything it could find. Somehow it never got around to the café. We are certainly not complaining.

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Its 2009 and Norwegian rider named Gabriel Rasch is cold and annoyed. He’s been cutting up an old waterproof vest from his previous team, pinning it tighter against his body and blacking out the logo with a marker so his sponsors won’t see. It’s not elegant. It’s a fix. But it works.

Castelli saw this and instantly made it into a product.

Two years of fabric research with Gore. Twenty-three prototypes. Windstopper X-Lite Plus fabric on the front, NanoFlex on the back. The working title was the Aero Rain Race Jersey. The riders just called it the Gabba, Rasch’s nickname. That stuck.

When it launched commercially in 2011, almost nobody bought it. Then 2013 Milan-San Remo happened. Snow. Rain. Freezing conditions. Half the peloton showed up in Gabbas with rival team logos scribbled out in marker, same as Rasch had done four years before. Riders buying them at shop price, out of their own pocket, because nothing else worked.

Milan San Remo, 2013.

That’s the only product review that matters.

Nearly 200,000 Gabbas sold since. Castelli invented a category and spent a decade watching everyone else build versions of it. By the time the Gabba R landed in 2024, a complete reinvention faster than a skinsuit in testing, the original had already been infrastructure for fifteen years.

Fifteen years. Think about how many “game-changing” drops have come and gone in that window.

Here’s the thing about that story. It isn’t a fluke and to understand why, you have to go back to 1876.

Milan, Italy. A tailor named Vittore Gianni, long before cycling was a sport anyone cared about, was making clothes that had to hold their shape under real conditions. He dressed institutions. AC Milan and Juventus. The Milan Ballet. Different worlds, same problem: clothes that worked while bodies were in motion.

Castelli didn’t begin as a cycling brand with a mood board and a launch strategy. It began as a maker responding to a specific problem. The bike came later. The mindset didn’t.

By the 1910s, cycling finally entered the picture. Gianni started making kit for professional riders, including Alfredo Binda, five-time Giro champion, during the early race years. No grand pivot. No rebrand. Just the same thinking applied to a new context. Riding exposes weak construction fast. Fit matters once effort stretches past an hour. Fabric matters when conditions turn. Castelli was already living in those details.

Alfredo Binda

By the 1940s, Castelli kits were on Bartali and Coppi. Races that now feel almost mythic. The brand didn’t muscle its way into those stories. It was just there, doing the work, close to where cycling actually happened.

Then Maurizio Castelli took over in the 1970s and quietly started breaking the status quo.

The Lycra cycling short in 1977. Colored ones in 1981 (at a time when only black was allowed at the Giro). The first windproof jersey, worn by Bernard Hinault to win Flèche Wallonne in 1983. Sublimation printing. The first anatomical seat pad. The first aero race jersey. Each one arrived without fanfare. Each one eventually became so standard that people forgot someone had to invent it first.

Solve it. Move on. Let others catch up. That’s the whole company in a sentence.

Bernard Hinault, La Fleche Wallone, 1983.

Here’s the thing though, right now, the brands getting the most attention in the cycling kit world are the ones you can see from a distance. Heavy graphics. Loud colourways. Instagram and Strava ready drops.

But there’s a different kind of credibility operating quietly underneath all of that. One that doesn’t ask to be seen. One that’s been there since before any of these brands existed.

Most riders don’t remember the first time they noticed Castelli. It usually happens sideways. A teammate shows up in bibs that seem to last forever. A cold ride forces a decision and Castelli is already on the shelf. The relationship starts without ceremony and continues without much thought. That absence of friction is the whole point.

The brands demanding your attention right now are building identities. Castelli has been building a record. Those are not the same thing. A record doesn’t need a drop. It doesn’t need a collab. It compounds on its own.

The First Lycra Short, 1977.

There were plenty of moments when leaving would have made sense. Doping scandals gutting the sport’s visibility. Thin margins in a small, technical category. Bigger brands with bigger budgets moving in. Many labels pivoted, diluted, or quietly disappeared. Castelli stayed. Not loudly. Not heroically. Just consistently.

Credibility in cycling doesn’t spike. It accumulates. Season after season, ride after ride. Castelli’s authority doesn’t come from announcements. It comes from being there when it matters. From working in bad weather. From still fitting right four hours in.

The brands getting the clicks right now are visible. Castelli is useful. In cycling, useful compounds. It becomes habit. Habit becomes infrastructure. Infrastructure is harder to dislodge than hype.

A Norwegian rider with a marker figured that out in 2009. The rest of the peloton caught up years later, scribbled logos and all.

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The Breakaway is for getting off the wheel. Longer thoughts on cycling, culture, and taste. Less reaction. More distance.

Cycling has always lived just outside the main conversation. Its close enough to matter, but always too kinda to strange to fully absorb.

It’s a sport you don’t really understand unless you participate in it. The rituals. The suffering. The details that feel insignificant until they aren’t. From the outside, cycling can look narrow and limited. Hard to translate.

For a brief moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s though, it looked like that was going to change.

Nike and Adidas, the two most powerful sportswear brands in the world, stepped into cycling with real intent. Not as a side project. Not as a novelty gig. They were testing whether cycling could sit alongside basketball, football, and golf. Whether it could carry the same cultural weight as the sports they already owned and thrived in.

Unfortunately, that relationship didn’t last very long.

What followed wasn’t dramatic. There was no loud exit or public reckoning. Just a slow realization that cycling doesn’t behave the way global brands need it to.

Nike’s relationship with cycling is inseparable from Lance Armstrong. When Armstrong returned to racing in 1996 after surviving testicular cancer, Nike didn’t see a cyclist. They saw a story that could be marketed 1000x over. An American comeback with enough emotional gravity to support an entire brand campaign for years to come.

Cycling, in that specific moment, wasn’t the product.
It was the setting.

Nike leaned fully into that framing. Armstrong-led campaigns. Nike-branded cycling shoes like the Nike Lance. And eventually the Livestrong wristband, which became one of the most culturally successful pieces of merchandise of its time. None of it required an understanding of the sport. You didn’t need to know the Tour de France. You just needed to believe in the story.

But Nike’s success has never been built on athletes alone. It has always been built on products that escape the sport.

Basketball didn’t become Nike’s most powerful category because people played more basketball. It became dominant because of the likes of Jordan Brand and its association with Michael Jordan. Shoes designed for the court, then adopted everywhere else. Worn to school, to work, to dinner. The product lived beyond the game. Those shoes rewrote the relationship between sport and fashion.

Cycling never offered that same runway.

Nike never created a cycling product people wanted to wear when they weren’t riding. There was no off-bike extension. No cultural bleed. No equivalent of a Jordan 1 for cyclists. Once you stepped off the bike, the relationship ended.

Adidas approached the sport very differently, but ran into the same ceiling.

Where Nike led with narrative, Adidas leaned into history and performance. The brand had deeper roots in European cycling culture, with earlier connections to figures like Eddy Merckx. That legacy resurfaced most clearly in 1997, when Jan Ullrich won the Tour de France wearing Adidas cycling shoes.

Adidas made real products for cyclists. Proper ones. Shoes, apparel, technical experiments. They treated cycling as a category worth engaging seriously.

But cycling proved to be a frustrating place to operate.

It’s a slow market. Loyalty runs deep. Riders don’t replace gear the way runners replace shoes. Innovation is incremental, expensive, and rarely rewarded at scale. Most importantly, cyclists spend their money almost entirely on equipment meant to be used while riding.

Cycling gear is purpose-built.
It rarely leaves the bike.

Unlike basketball or football, cycling doesn’t naturally generate lifestyle product. Jerseys stay jerseys. Shoes stay clipped in. Helmets don’t cross over. For brands whose biggest wins come from products worn outside the sport, that limitation mattered.

By the mid-2000s, both brands were already pulling back. The Armstrong scandal and the broader doping fallout accelerated exits that were largely inevitable. In 2012, Nike formally ended its relationship with Armstrong after more than fifteen years. Adidas had already retreated from road cycling, maintaining only limited involvement through track cycling and Olympic programs (they are somewhat back in the game, but the product is still underwhelming).

It’s easy to frame these departures as reputational decisions. But that misses the larger point.

Cycling didn’t fail Nike and Adidas.
Nike and Adidas refused to scale on cycling’s terms.

These brands are built to dominate categories by extending them outward. They turn sport into culture, then culture into everyday life. Cycling has so far resisted that expansion. Authority is fragmented. History matters more than novelty. Credibility is earned slowly, usually through obsession rather than scale.

Once it became clear cycling would never naturally produce products that lived beyond the ride, it stopped being interesting as a category.

What’s telling is how little the sport seemed to notice their absence. Cycling carried on the same way it always has. Small, obsessive brands kept building gear. Teams changed sponsors. Fans kept arguing about details that don’t translate well outside the bubble.

The brands that survive here tend to share one trait. They refuse to leave.

Cycling rewards endurance. Not just on the road, but in business. The brands that matter are the ones that stayed through uncool years, doping eras, shifting trends, and technological dead ends. They didn’t chase scale. They didn’t look for exits. They built slowly and stayed close to the sport. They invested.

Design-led labels represent the new wave. They speak to younger riders, to style, to identity. They’ve helped push cycling into new cultural territory and made it feel relevant again.

But permanence in cycling looks different.

Brands like Castelli have been part of cycling long enough to feel permanent. Not because they’re fashionable, but because they’re embedded. They’ve dressed generations of riders. Their products are trusted, familiar, and difficult to replace. In cycling, longevity becomes its own form of credibility.

You don’t churn brands here the way you do in other sports. Once something works, people stay loyal.

That’s the tension modern cycling brands now face. Performance alone isn’t enough anymore. Design alone isn’t either. If brands truly want to survive in the long run, their next challenge is learning how to exist beyond the ride without losing credibility on it.

This is where Nike and Adidas always struggled.

Their biggest successes came from sports that naturally extended into everyday life. Cycling, by contrast, has kept its gear functional and contained. The relationship often ends when the ride does.

That boundary is starting to soften.

If cycling brands want to grow without losing their core audience, they’ll need to start thinking more seriously about life off the bike. Not as a lifestyle grab or merch play, but as a continuation of the culture. How people dress before the ride. After it. On rest days. On travel days. In moments where cycling still informs how they move through the world.

The brands that succeed won’t be the ones trying to be everywhere. They’ll be the ones that understand when to stay close to the sport, and when to let cycling quietly inform everything else.

The takeaway from all of this isn’t that Nike and Adidas misplayed their hand. It’s that cycling is hard to own. It’s something that has to be lived with.

It absorbs attention, borrows influence, and then continues on its own path. The brands that last here aren’t the loudest or the biggest. They’re the ones willing to commit for the long haul, even when the payoff is slow and the wins are subtle.

To submit a site, product, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.