If the cap fits…
Whatever your views on cycling headwear, it’s a tradition worth preserving, says Frank Strack
Dear Frank,
What’s going on with the pro peloton regarding the cycling cap? Have they left them at home? In the last few years pro riders have ditched the cap in favour of… baseball caps. What’s next? Hoodies? May Merckx help us all! Miguel, by email
Dear Miguel
When I was growing up in the States, I was an avid cross-country ski racer, and I first turned to cycling in an effort to find a more enjoyable means of summer training than roller-skiing, possibly the most diabolical activity ever.
Being a cross-country skier was about as cool as being a cyclist, both of which were roughly as cool as being an asthmatic who had to wear a respirator in school. Or so I’ve heard. So I was never cool. There were ski teams that I could join, but there were almost no bicycle racing teams around at that time, and the cycling community slowly became the one I identified with. We spread our network across schools in the area and formed small riding clubs where we would train, race, take solace, and pore over cycling mags. We were a very select group, less so for our skill than simply for our scarcity. When out of our cycling kit, we identified ourselves by a singular beacon: the cycling cap.
The cycling cap is perhaps the most unattractive article of clothing ever devised, apart from the footballer’s shin guard. They are equally functional and equally ill-placed in mainstream fashion.
In my wildest dreams, I would never expect to happen upon a person wearing shin guards in public, except if they were departing a football field. Similarly, in those days, one would never expect to see an individual wearing a cycling cap who was not immediately departing a bicycle.
In an effort to identify one another within the general public, we adopted the cycling cap as a replacement to the frat-boy styling of the baseball cap, and (together with our shaved legs) we began to wear it out in public, a social order of magnitude from the secret realm of the bicycle. No, we didn’t get dates and, no, we didn’t have money, but we had our integrity and we had our (perverse) sense of style, and we could spot one another in any social situation.
For many years we wore our caps with pride, giving each other the nod of acceptance, usually an unnoticeable glance that was largely met with a similarly but very gratifying unnoticeable return glance (we weren’t social engineers, after all, we were dorks riding bikes).
Then it happened. I was working at the ironically named Midwest Mountaineering sports shop (ironic in that there are no mountains to mountaineer in the Midwestern United States). There was a sex symbol of a man whose name I’ve gladly forgotten, despite my efforts to recall it under the circumstance of shaming him in this column. He was a rock climber of some reputation, and all the women in the shop had the hots for him even though, in my view, he was just an asshole wearing a Sacred Cap of the Order and he obviously didn’t have the slightest inkling of who the hell Roger De Vlaeminck was. It made me not want to wear my cycling cap anymore. In some intangible way, it felt contaminated.
Then, eventually, cyclists started wearing baseball caps on the podium instead of cycling caps. It might have started with Greg Lemond in 1989 when he wore a bright pink Coors Light cap, simultaneously cementing the erroneous Continental notion that American beer sucks. (In his defence, he wore a classic cotton Z cycling cap in 1990.)
The Quick Step-floors team, as well as the singular presence of Mark Cavendish in his recent years, seem to be the only public pioneers bringing the cotton cycling cap back to the podium, and for that act alone, they are my standout areas of focus in cycling aesthetics.
I’m reminded that the ignorant masses do not hold the power; the informed individual does. We alone have the responsibility to act and once again take the initiative to wear the Sacred Cap in public to proudly display our stripes. We lead by example at the individual level, and eventually that message will spread. If we all wear our cycling caps on our own podiums, however small they are, eventually, it will trickle back up. In the words of Rage Against The Machine: Take the power back.