LEFT TURNS is where we go off script. Things no one asked for. Things that needed to be said as soon as we think of them. Still GH. Just further out. Off the dome.
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:
Tour riders stopping mid-race to drink wine, eat at cafés, and disappear into the peloton with a glass of something cold. The history of la chasse à la canette and what cycling gave up when it decided to grow up.
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.
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.
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.
Think about the New York Yankees cap. Most people wearing it have never watched a game. They have no attachment to the Bronx. Couldn’t even name the starting lineup. They wear it because it represents something. A city. An attitude. A cultural shorthand that travels everywhere a baseball cap can go. The object escaped the sport a long time ago and became something else entirely.
That does not happen by accident. It happens because somewhere along the line someone understood that a sports team can be a cultural object, not just a sports team. And they built everything accordingly.
Cycling has never had that person.
Kenny Annan-Jonathan, Creative Director of Crystal Palace
Every other sport with cultural ambitions has figured this out. Kenny Annan-Jonathan became the first creative director in the Premier League when Crystal Palace hired him in 2023. He said something that has stuck with us: we want to be able to design stuff that can exist outside of football. That sentence. That is the whole job description. Not making merch. Not designing a limited edition jersey for a cup run. Building things that people want to own regardless of whether they follow the team. Objects that carry the culture of the team into rooms the team itself cannot reach.
Rhuigi Villaseñor of Rhude and Chief Creative Director of Como 1907
Rhuigi Villaseñor did the same thing for Como 1907. After his name sake brand (RHUDE) blew up, he moved to Lake Como. Became Chief Brand Officer and minority owner of the team. Staged his Rhude runway show at Villa d’Este. Designed a fourth kit for their final match against Inter Milan that had LAKE COMO - LOS ANGELES across the back. Opened a members club on the lake. The club and the brand and the city became the same thing. That is not simply a jersey. That is a world.
Daniel Arsham of Arsham Studios and Creative Director of the Cleveland Cavaliers
Daniel Arsham has been creative director of the Cleveland Cavaliers since 2020. Guillermo Andrade of 424 was creative advisor for the MLS Leagues Cup in 2023. These are not stunts. These are structural decisions made by organizations that understood culture is not a side project.
Guillermo Andrade of 424 and Creative Advisor for the MLS Leagues Cup
Now think about what this could look like in cycling. A creative director for a WorldTour team with real authority over the whole thing. The race kit, obviously. But also the off-bike wardrobe. A jacket that references the team’s color history without screaming the sponsor’s name. A cap with the right weight and the right brim. Objects that someone who has never watched a race might still want to own because they are just genuinely well made and considered. Merch that is not “advertising”. Things that carry the team’s identity into a room that the team itself would never enter.
The sport races through Florence, Liege, the Dolomites, the cobbles of Flanders. So many incredible cities. Such beautiful visuals. A creative director who understood what those races mean culturally could build something around a team that no manufacturer’s brief ever would. Not geography. Identity. The team with a point of view on what the sport means. The team whose kit tells you something about who they are and what they believe. Not just who paid for it.
To be quite frank, this would be our dream job. We started GRAVITYHILL because we believe cycling culture deserves to be taken seriously. A creative director role at a WorldTour team (or any team, really) is that same belief at a completely different scale. The jersey, the riders, the world built around them. We would do it without hesitation.
Somebody in this sport needs to make the call. Hire the person. Give them real authority. Let them build something that exists outside of cycling. The proof that this works is already inside the sport. The Rockets built an entire fanbase before they had the results to justify it. Storytelling first. Community first. And what makes them genuinely different from every other team in the peloton is that people actually love the Rockets as a team, not just the riders on it. When a rider leaves, the fans stay. That is what a real identity does. A creative director builds that identity deliberately instead of leaving it to chance. Cycling is a beautiful, complex, visually extraordinary sport that most of the world hasn’t truly discovered yet (especially in North America). Other sports are not waiting. They are building worlds that exist outside the sport itself and pulling new fans in through culture, through objects, through things people want to wear and own and be associated with. Cycling is still sending out press releases. The sport needs to modernize how it thinks about its own culture and a creative director is one real way to start doing that.
To submit a find, a brand, or whatever you’re working on, email KMC@GRAVITYHILL.CC. We read everything. Posting is never guaranteed, but curiosity always is.
Legion of LA appears to me as the only one in the sport who has embraced this concept. Their brand and followership has expanded beyond the fans of USA crit cycling. Shows what is possible with intentional branding and content.