The story of the humble chamois
Are you sitting comfortably? Then Kevin Raymond will begin...
First things first — how do you say it? Chamois is pronounced ‘shamwah’. Except no one ever calls it that — it’s usually corrupted to shammy. You can’t blame cyclists for that — blame generations of window cleaners, carriage drivers and chauffeurs of posh early motor cars, who used the peculiar, absorbent and nonabrasive qualities of this soft, flexible leather to good effect long before cyclists did.
Second things second — it’s not really chamois leather at all. Originally, back in the 18th century, the term signified the skin of the Alpine antelope of the same name, tanned with fish oil to make a soft cloth used in glove-making. But for over 100 years it’s been made from sheep’s hides.
Why did cyclists start sewing bits of dead sheep into their shorts? It wasn’t for padding — early inserts weren’t the big cushioned pads we have today, they were just a single layer. Instead it was designed partly to absorb sweat, and mainly to act as a protective layer between the rider’s skin and the abrasive surface of natural wool shorts.
There were two problems, though. Firstly, in the rain both the wool and the leather would stretch — it wasn’t uncommon to get out of the saddle to sprint out of a corner, only for your shorts to stay where they were. Secondly, the leather didn’t take kindly to being washed — a bit of a problem for sports kit that needs washing every day. The oils in the leather get washed away and the result is a crinkly torture device.
The solution was to treat the leather with something to restore the oils and make it supple again. That usually meant lanolinbased grease. If the thought of pulling up a pair of shorts freshly slathered with sheep-based grease is making you queasy, that’s only half the story.
Here’s Tom Simpson, describing an incident during the legendarily tough Bordeaux-paris race back in 1965.
“Because it was so wet in the night we made a gentlemen’s agreement to stop and change our wet clothes. I wanted to put on clean shorts and had put some grease in them. Suddenly I saw a Peugeot rider go away. A cry of ‘the bastard’ went up and it was pandemonium! I struggled into my shoes again, still wearing my dirty socks, hurriedly pulled on my clean pants, already greased, and leapt on my bike. [But] what had happened was that as I had put on my shorts, gravel from my shoes had stuck in the grease and was now hurting like the devil!
“So there I am, riding along digging my hands inside my shorts and pulling out lumps of gravel. I was still scraping gravel off my behind for some miles.”
He still managed third in Paris.