Hey, did you know that there’s a bike race going on in France, and the riders are wearing space clothes?
It’s true!
During the Tour de France, athletes have to maintain a constant speed while bike riding for dozens of miles through cold rains and summer heat. These cyclists need gear that adapts to the different environments they encounter. One company is using a material with NASA origins to ensure these athletes stay comfortable while taking their grand tours.
“Dozens of miles,” really?
I guess it’s technically true on a daily basis, but it doesn’t really sound very impressive when you put it that way, now does it?
In any case, the company making their clothes out of space cloth is Ekoï:
Who are of course the inventors of the famous LäctoGräv jersey:
This jersey was originally developed for drinking in a zero-gravity environment, but it turns out they forgot to take into account the whole rotating-the-bottle-to-get-the-air-out-of-the-way thing, making it useless for astronauts:
So they had a meeting:
“Shit, we made a thousand of these things and NASA doesn’t want them now. Who the hell else is gonna use this stupid thing?”
[Beat]
“Cyclists!”
[They high-five]
One has to wonder if this guy was too busy drinking from his own nipples when he hit a police motorcycle in the bike lane:
The San Diego County Bike Coalition guy makes a good point about how they didn’t put out any flares and cones like they would have if they were towing a car in the motor vehicle lane, but I’m pretty confident Fred would have missed those too.
Sadly, things are only going to get worse before they get better, because the drive to reinvent how cyclists drink water is not going to end anytime soon:
And here’s an incomplete list of bicycle components you now have to remember to charge:
Shifters and Derailleurs
[What they’ve done to 105 makes me sad.]
Seatposts
[I don’t even know if that one’s electronic or not but let’s just pretend that it is.]
Hubs:
Valve Stems
It’s only $130!
(That’s each, I’m assuming.)
Pedals
Cranks
But hey, at least you don’t have to charge your chain yet. In fact, you can now use your chain to charge everything else:
If it also cleans your chain maybe they’re onto something.
They just need to make it a little more phallic to compete with the industry standard:
Still the most suggestive bicycle accessory ever made–and you don’t even need to charge it!