It all began, perhaps, a little over 30 years ago with the brilliant and misunderstood intuition of Graeme Obree, the Scottish cyclist who made a bicycle with scrap metal and bearings from a washing machine, designed a helmet that widened towards the shoulders and, using a posture copied from downhill skiers, neck over the handlebars, arms folded behind, he rode 51,596 kilometers in an hour in a velodrome.
Obree, and his disruptive movement, was in a way lucky that at that time, July 1993, social networks were not even a possibility that disturbed anyone’s mind and the denigration campaign of the establishment It was more of a low-intensity fire that spread slowly, but even so, there was such criticism and the position, called the egg, seemed so ridiculous to the leaders of the International Cycling Union (UCI), that they soon banned it, as , shortly after, always immersed in a battle against technological innovation for the sake of a tradition that never existed, they later banned bicycles that did not have a diamond frame (double triangle), the Superman posture and the couplings that allowed Indurain, Boardman or Rominger beat the hour record, and, as these days, three decades have passed, they announce that they will change the regulations to prohibit the latest generation aerodynamic helmets that teams like Visma and Bahrain have used in the Tirreno-Adriatico time trials and Paris-Nice.
“We, every day thinking to see how we can scratch the clock and the UCI, as always… Now prohibit the balaclava that those from Bora and Soudal wear under the helmet in the trials because they say that it is not an essential element, and “They have been using it for two years…”, says Jon Iriberri, a pioneer of cycling biomechanics in Spain who, after passing through the Spanish track team and Movistar, has been working for Visma for a few years and has participated, together with the American manufacturer Giro, in the design and experimentation of Vingegaard and company helmets. “And they will surely tell us something too, even though we have informed them of all our work and we comply with all size standards.” [45cm de largo, 30 de ancho, 21 de alto] and security measures that add weight. The issue is that then arguments appear that were not previously in the debate at the time of authorizing, such as that the aesthetic pattern of what cycling was is broken.” The aesthetic argument should also be in the federation’s warning against the EF’s flying saucer helmets, the pinnacle of ugliness, which have been in use for 10 years now.
Its forms, as fantastic as if they were the daughters of a dream born in some LSD pills, but in reality purely Bauhaus: form follows function, and mistreated mercilessly on the networks, and even the official X of Paris-Nice creates a meme with the Visma cyclists and the music of the Imperial March from Star Wars, Since they all look like Darth Vader in yellow, they are actually scientific confirmation of Obree’s ideas. And the way he looks, and the image he creates of them, doesn’t keep cyclists awake at all, whose only goal is to improve performance. As Oier Lazkano, Movistar’s great time trialist, summarizes, “the important thing is efficiency and not aesthetics.” No cyclist has refused to wear it for fear of what they will say, of course. Riding at more than 50 per hour the only obstacle is the wind, which opposes the same speed plus the own speed if it is facing you. A good aerodynamic penetration coefficient means that fewer watts, less energy, less lactate rise, and fewer pulsations are needed to achieve the same speed as with worse aerodynamics. How many watts does the ridiculous quote?
YOAN VALAT (EFE)
The helmets are born as a result of the latest advances in research, only possible with the commercial accessibility of fluid dynamics calculations, thousands and thousands of data to process, in supercomputers hosted in the cloud, the multiplication of wind tunnels and 3D printing of exact models, perfect mannequins in size and volume of runners such as Van Aert, Vingegaard or Sepp Kuss.
The key to aerodynamics, the wisdom of downhill skiers, is to not let even a ray of air that generates turbulence sneak through the plane formed by the head, shoulders and arms of the cyclist, who has his chin between his elbows. and can only see through the arms. The new helmets, apart from a sloped and tapered front surface, cover the width of the shoulders, creating, if the rider is able to maintain it, a compact and reduced surface impenetrable for the air, which is deflected to the sides without causing differences in pressure or braking turbulence. This is explained by Iván Velasco, design engineer at Movistar, a team that is also experimenting, not yet publicly, with new helmet designs for time trials, a specialty that is reborn and gaining in importance on the Tour de France routes (60 kilometers) and Giro d’Italia (70 kilometers).
“The calculations we have made in the Eindhoven wind tunnel tell us about a little more than a second of gain per kilometer, which does not mean that all runners can achieve it,” explains Iriberri. “If we technicians get the rider to use the helmet as it was designed, he will surely obtain a value that, although it will not be that of the wind tunnel, will at least come close to it and obtain a great advantage. And yet, if the rider is not capable, then the helmet will be of minimal advantage or even need not be. When the cyclist is attached and is making good use of the helmet, a problem that we have been thinking about for years is solved, which is the distance between the face, forearms and hands. The challenge is to cover the fundamental part of the face and what is above the face, to make a whole between the head, shoulders and arms, which already come with the coupling also integrated.”