Protocol in a Port-of-Call

[ornoth_cycling]

Bicycling has certain protocols. One of them is that you don’t wear team kit unless you are being paid to weat it, or can at least hammer faster than anyone else in the vicinity. Anything less would be incredbily gauche. Picture a 275-pound flab-gator tooling around, sweating profusely at 13 mph on the flat, piloting a replica of Lance’s bike, wearing Lance’s team jersey. Tack-ay. But sadly far too common.

That goes eightfold for the yellow jersey: the symbol of leadership in the Tour de France. Any cyclist who can wear the yellow jersey for real, that is the best day of his entire life, without exception. People devote their entire professional lives to earning that right. Whole squads of people devote their lives just to have the opportunity to indirectly help someone else earn that right. In the past century, only 261 people have earned the right to wear a yellow jersey.

So you can imagine how massive a faux pas it is for a weekend hacker to put on a replica yellow jersey. It’s like showing off your (replica) Nobel Prize for Literature when you’re not even professionally published. It’s like proudly displaying your “Olympic Gold” at work, when in reality the closest you’ve come to the Olympics was spending one Saturday laughing when Olympic curling was on television a few years back.

Wearing a replica maillot jaune is the single biggest act of hubris a cyclist can conceive of.

So you can see where this is going. Recently some blithering idiot showed up for our group ride in a replica Tour de France leader’s jersey. A woman. Wearing sneakers, rather than cycling shoes. Who felt the ideal accessory for the maillot jaune was a big ole fanny pack. On a cheap department store flat-bar bike. With reflectors and a kick-stand, for Christ’s sake!!!

Now sure, you can mark all that down to ignorance, but that’s some absolutely amazingly superlative kind of ignorance, unabashedly paraded out in public in a way that just demanded to be noticed. That’s much worse than nine-months-pregnant-in-your-wedding-dress level stuff.

Folks, don’t do stuff like that. Please! You’ll get spat out the back of the ride like a wad of stale chaw, and be left behind, alone on the open road but for the echoing laughter your offensive hubris earned.

Comments

[ornoth.livejournal.com]

> I believe that wearing a replica team jersey is akin to sports fans
> wearing their favorite sports jersey that has a name on their back.

You might convince me of that. But isn't wearing a Conseco or Gretzkey jersey while actually playing the game a bit presumptuous?

> BTW, what does being a woman have to do with it?

Well, women can't compete in the TdF, nor earn its yellow jersey. Although there is the Grande Boucle Feminin, which has its own yellow jersey, women's cycling has yet to achieve the same parity of competition and interest as sports such as tennis.

> And because she hasn't spent $3k on a bike and $100 on cycling shoes and
> another $100 on clipless pedals, and hasn't taken the kickstand and
> reflectors off to get more speed, she's worse off for it?

Naw, that's her choice. But to wear the garb reserved for the best professional cyclist on the planet with a fanny pack and a kickstand is as clashing an image as one could produce.

> She's going to be left behind because your group ride isn't really open
> to newbies, no matter what the official policy says. Your disdain for her

Here you've gone off on your own path of conjecture, and you're just wrong. I would argue that the group I ride with is singularly accommodating. We regularly get thirty to fifty riders, with a handful of new riders each week. We've encouraged and trained several hundred charity riders, and have a substantial ratio of women. In order to accommodate riders of varying levels, the ride usually breaks up into several sub-groups which self-select based on how fast and how far people want to go. The group has been written about in local newspapers and regional cycling magazines. I would suggest that your conclusions about "my group ride" aren't based on anything but conjecture and judgments based on your past experience with some completely different group.

> So what you're saying is, before one goes for a group ride, one should
> spend thousands of dollars on equipment and somehow magically know that
> bicycling, unlike any other sport, looks down on people who buy replica
> jerseys to show support? Or perhaps it's like every other sport, and you
> (and perhaps others who sniggered with you) are being elitist?

I have to say, you've gone a long way on your own from my original statements. I just said that pairing a TdF yellow jersey with a fanny pack is gauche. On th eother hand, you're the one telling me what I'm saying while making your own indefensible generalizations about "how every sport is".

> How different would you have felt if she averaged 18 mph and kicked ass
> and led the line in the ride?

That would be somewhat different in some ways. Wearing team kit when one's not paid to is tacky in either case, but if one can hammer with the best, then that strength earns its own respect, irrespective of what one wears.

That's for team kit. On the other hand, wearing the yellow jersey of a TdF leader is way beyond simple team kit, so the tackiness factor ratchets up proportionally. If you do something that arrogant, you're throwing down a gauntlet, and you really do need to be able to back it up.