XDS-Astana’s already colourful kit had an extra rainbow flair during the stage 3 team time trial in Paris-Nice on Sunday, with each rider sporting different coloured overshoes and socks – pinks, greens and yellows rather than their usual white.
But this bright accessory wasn’t just a fashion accessory, in fact it was a practical idea from the team’s new performance engineer and retired time trial specialist Alex Dowsett.
“The gloves and overshoes is an idea I’ve been sat on for a long time and was grateful the team let me implement it and that the riders bought into it. (And that UCI ok’d it!)” Dowsett wrote on social media.
The purpose, he explained in a reel posted to the team’s Instagram, is to help riders identify each other when slotting back into the line after their turn on the front, something which can be an extra effort during what is already an extremely demanding discipline.
“The big difficult thing about team time trials [is that] from that respect everyone looks the same,” Dowsett said.
“So there could be that split second where you’re like ‘Is that Tejada or is that Teunissen?’ The first thing you see from each rider is the hands, so I thought what if we could make everyone’s gloves a different colour. So instead of looking for the person or the riding style of that person, or counting ‘one, two, three, four, five, six, I’m in’, you’re just looking for a colour.”
Those colours – stylish pastels, fitting well with the team’s colour scheme – were on each rider's gloves and overshoes, making the different members of the team identifiable from any angle.
There’s no enormous performance benefit, Dowsett concedes, but this is more in the style of the marginal gains of Team Sky where the Brit started his career.
“It’s a small advantage, let’s not beat around the bush,” Dowsett said. “We’re not saving on aero gains or anything. This is an advantage amongst the riders, I think, and it is a small one.
“It’s also for the directors in the car behind, they’re not having to memorise riders’ numbers. I think it will just be easier for the directors to know if someone needs to miss a turn, if someone says they’re struggling, if someone’s getting in off the back. It will hopefully be easier to relay that information to the riders as well.”
Little tricks to help teams identify their riders seem to be becoming more common in the peloton. Jonas Vingegaard, for example, is wearing a red helmet during Paris-Nice this week, presumably in part to help differentiate the leader from his Visma-Lease a Bike teammates.
Ultimately, XDS-Astana finished 13th on stage 3, won by Visma-Lease a Bike, but they were one of only two WorldTour teams to go to the line with three riders, so something in their plan certainly worked.
“Boys rode well, we are a working progress [sic] on the TT side so the result was encouraging internally,” was Dowsett’s assessment.
