New Kit time!

Ok cats and kittens, it's "That" time of year again - yes, we have to brace ourselves for the new team kits.

Sadly, hardly any teams seem to be able to leave the kit alone for more than five minutes, and the end-of-season break seems to be viewed as the ideal time to change it all again.

Of course, if the team is newly formed, or newly merged, or newly pruned of a sponsor, then there is a legitimate case to be made for a new kit: an expression about "new brooms" comes to mind.

[note for non-UK readers - the expression is "the new broom sweeps cleanest" meaning that a new management or government or leader is often inclined to sort out problems that an old one may have been overlooking for years. On the other hand, there is another phrase, "but the old broom knows the corners" which implies that the new broom might miss some of the important areas, being so caught up in the excitement of being new. End of digression, please read on.]

Of course, being Andy fans, we are all agog to see what sort of mess the new RadioTrek Nissan kit is going to be.

Remember how disappointed we were, when we first saw the classic, elegant, clean lines of the Leopard kit? "Boring!" we all shouted, "Too close to Sky - and Garmin - and, er, anyone else with a plain black kit!"

But we eventually came to love it, spot it in the peloton, and some of us (er hem) even made flags of it, to wave at the Tour of Britain, or emblazoned their logo on the back of all their work t-shirts....

[Another digression: for me, the only disappointment of the final day of the Tour of Britain - apart from Jensi not being there, of course - was that I was the only person in the whole of London with a Leopard flag, and the Leopard car didn't even wave back at me - not once! It went past 16 times, but I didn't get even a tiny wave from a back seat passenger. Oh well *sigh* maybe I'll have to make a bigger one for next year...]

So, onto new kits. Here's the first one to be announced - Lotto Belisol.

This is half of the former Omega-Pharma Lotto team, now split into Omega-Pharma-Quickstep (catchy!) and Lotto-Belisol (oh dear, Belisol? Sounds like an ointment.)

Here's the old OLO kit, which always makes me think of chewing gum, for some reason. Must be the colour combinations. It was a bit jazzy with logos, but nice distinctive colour bands, easy to spot in the peloton although personally, I am not in favour of having different-coloured shoulders or sides, as it means that the riders look different depending on which side the camera goes. I don't like this, as it means having to learn two kits for one team! (oh dear, so lazy.)

And the new Lotto kit? Well, here it is: the press release calls it "sober and coherent" and some rubbish about "which reflects the dynamism of our riders, their class, and their savoir-faire.” Yes, fine.

Personally I think it looks as though someone has taken a sheet of navy-blue paper, some of which has been printed with the word Lotto, chopped it up into pieces, dropped them from a height onto a board, then cut out an outline of a jersey and shorts, with no regard to how the blocks of colour match up .

I mean, look at that little shark's fin at the front hem: what's that for? It fails to line up with the panel in the shorts, which it could so easily do - and it has half a logo of some sort on it.

And the weird curvy "Lotto" word on the right leg? Can you imagine how distorted that is going to look, on the legs of their sprinters, with their big thigh muscles?  I'm not keen on the leg bands, either - one red, one white, it's just jumbled, incoherent, and not particularly pretty.

And why is the word Belisol in a different shade of blue from every other blue used on the kit?  By the way, in case you're wondering who Belisol are, they make PVC doors and Windows. So if  Omega-Pharma-Lotto ever get back together, the two left-out sponsors can combine wooden floors with PVC doors and windows, and can "construct" a team of their own. (That was a joke.)

So, I'm not that impressed with the first of the new kits, but well done to Lotto for getting it out nice and early, and good luck for the coming season.

So now we turn to RadioTrekNissanShack. Well, we don't even know their name yet, let alone their kit - hey, have we not been here before? How many Leopards ended up in the new squad? 12 or so? My, that sounds so familiar....

Leaving that aside, we turn to The Kit.

RadioShack used to be grey with a big red panel, (right)  and the fetching little yellow armbands, which were the symbol of the Livestrong cancer foundation.  The shorts were more-or-less red, with grey panels.




Then they went to the red, white and black kit of last year - left - which was much nicer, we all approve of black shorts, and they added a very useful white back panel - like the Sky kit, designed to be cooler for the riders on hot days - but with a striking thick red stripe up the middle, making them very easy to spot in the peloton.

Now they are going to be starting again: so what can we deduce? Well, the RadioShack stores have the "R" logo, so we can guess that will appear somewhere, and it seems to be either white circle and R filled in with red, or red circle and R with a white background. I can't immediately see any logic as to which way they do it, but I haven't really researched it thoroughly. (the hateful phrase "can't be arsed" comes to mind, sorry.)

Nissan dealerships have as their house colours silver or grey, with vertical red stripes around the doors, and the logo is of course the big chrome "hamburger", a circle with a bar across it horizontally.

Overall, we are therefore likely to get grey and red as our main colours, with at least one circular logo, probably the RadioShack "R".    I have a horrible feeling that we will be keeping the yellow hoop somewhere in the kit.

Why "horrible"? I've nothing against Lance Armstrong, I have cheered for him in the past, I've read a couple of his books (oh, by the way, I've now read Mark Cavendish's book Boy Racer - it was jolly good, surprisingly, and quite insightful. And you should HEAR what he says about the independent drugs testing company, ACE, which HTC used to use, but ditched as they were not particularly any good, and did not seem to have any anti-contamination protocols in place. And WADA are going to be calling them to give evidence in the Conti case. Oh dear, oh dear...)  but I'm just a little worried about all that bad publicity and doping speculation, and I'd rather start "our" new team off without past links.  In fact, the whole charity thing is a marvellously worthwhile cause, but really, honestly, I'd rather be able to choose my charities privately, than be in effect "forced" to support them if I choose to support the new RaNT team.

Anyway, back to the kit: it's probably a bit late, but RaNT, may I just politely remind you of some important points about kit design.

1) Black shorts. Don't discuss it, just do it.
2) Same colours visible front and back. Lampre......were they pink? Or blue?
3) Something very distinctive on the back, for helicopter peloton shots.
4) Same colours left and right!
5) Don't waste anything good on the lower chest area: last year, Garmin suddenly popped up in a glaring white kit, total contrast to the normal black one, for the Tour, and it wasn't until days after the race had ended, when I saw a photo of them en masse, that I even realised that there was a big band of blue argyle on the front! Make the designers watch a race before they start designing... cyclist hunch over their handlebars, crumpling up that lower chest area, so we can't see it at all.

Don't believe me? Here's the Garmin squad in action. Let's look at those jerseys: black band across the chest, letter E on the shoulder, blue arm bands for Johan Van Summeren to roll up..... and that's all, isn't it?

Nope! This is the whole thing.

What a waste, eh? We couldn't see that extensive blue argyling at all.

AND - added at a later date because LLB reminded me of it, and I can't believe I forgot to mention this - the white Garmin kit had the ultimate level of stupidity and bad design:  the blue argyle-ing went round the back as well. Sorry? You didn't see it? That's because they printed the blue argyle right up to the top of the pockets. The pockets? Yes, the pockets.  You know, the handy receptacles for bottle, gels, bananas: those handy panels that the numbers are pinned on to....

Yes, they chose to put the one bit of distinctive colour on the back, in the one place where it would be competely invisible.

And you are seriously telling me that they paid a professional company to design the kit?

Well, those are my Top Tips for kit design, it will be interesting to see what we get. I do hope that we aren't going to be kept on the hook right into the new year....

Come on Mr Bruyneel, I bet you've been doodling kit designs on your scratch pad all year long, please don't keep us waiting too long.