All the Freaky World Tour Time Trial Helmets, Ranked by How Excited they Make Me About the Future
A tribute to the only storyline from Paris-Nice
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Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico are underway this week; I mentioned this on Tuesday in my post about the latter race’s unique and wonderful trophy. There’s been some interesting racing, a potential breakout performance by Visma-Lease a Bike’s Dutch sprinter Olav Kooij, even an American in yellow for a stage.
But most of all, there’s been time trialing: An individual time trial at Tirreno, and a team time trial at Paris-Nice. UAE won both—the former behind Juan Ayuso, who will absolutely win a grand tour at some point if he can race this well against the clock. The team time trial win at Paris-Nice got Brandon McNulty into the race lead, and the mustachioed Arizonan sits (as of this writing) in third place overall after five stages; a strong climbing performance over the weekend could see him end up on the overall podium.
It matters not. The time trial is cycling’s avant-garde fashion event, never more so than this week.
In 1989, Greg LeMond won the Tour de France by uncovering such earthshaking innovations as “riding in an aerodynamic tuck” and “wearing a streamlined helmet instead of letting your skullet flap around like a windsock.” And ever since then, pro cyclists have assiduously studied the art of cutting through air with minimum effort. How can we make the human body as slippery as a supersonic fighter?
Thus came specialized time trial bikes, with rear disc wheels, beefy frames, and triathlon-style handlebars. We have specialized, wind tunnel-tested skinsuits, and helmets made to direct air around the pointier parts of the human body.
Around the turn of the century, the in-vogue style was a long stingray-like tail that tucked along the rider’s back, seen here on Dave Zabriskie.
That’s against the rules now, so modern time trial helmets are rounded and shorter in the back. But at Tirreno and Paris-Nice, Visma-Lease a Bike unveiled the Giro Aerohead II. (Click now if you want to spoil what comes next.) This helmet extends forward from the rider’s noggin, not back, which apparently creates a cleaner aerodynamic profile as the rider chugs along. Don’t ask me how. Apparently it works.
It also pissed off the UCI, which announced it will study the newest breed of time trial helmets to make sure the current trend toward bigness and wideness isn’t compromising safety. In other words, we’re probably going to get a crackdown on these goofy-looking helmets soon.
Which is a shame. Anyone who’s willing to look like a sperm on international TV deserves to have a few seconds knocked off his time trial score. That’s The Will to Win, in my opinion. It’s innovative. It’s creative. It makes me think about flying cars and maglev and The Future.
So in celebration of these probably-not-long-for-this-world time trial helmets, here’s a ranking of all 18 World Tour teams’ time trial helmets from Paris-Nice, in order of how much they invoke the Spirit of Tomorrow.1
18. DSM-Firmenich PostNL (Manufactured by Scott)
This just makes me sad. A basic, old-school helmet with sunglasses instead of a fancy magnetic clip-on visor, worn willy-nilly on all angles on the riders’ heads. This is some late-1990s shit. You wear this helmet, get workplace bullied by Lance Armstrong, and go back to the hotel to get injected with someone else’s red blood cells. It looks like frosted tips, a rugby shirt, and cargo pants, and not in a good way. Get it away. It displeases me.
17. Jayco-Alula (Manufactured by Giant)
I like the rounded vents a lot. It looks like a rocket pod from an Apache attack helicopter. Indeed, there was a time when Caleb Ewan rode like he had rockets coming out of his forehead. But in 2024, I think an integrated visor is just table stakes for a professional time trial helmet. Sunglasses are not the future.
16. Arkéa-B&B Hotels (Manufactured by EKOÏ)
The helmet’s fine. I hate the color scheme. An all-white helmet with a red jersey and black shorts just looks wrong. Every other team either has a helmet that matches either jersey or shorts, or has a kit that’s so ugly you’re not concerned with the helmet not matching. And then there’s the bike. Bianchi, more than any other bike manufacturer, is associated with a color—they call it celeste—that doesn’t change to fit the branding of the team.2 In the past that’s been fine. I think Bianchi’s celeste worked well with the black and yellow of Jumbo-Visma, but with the red—particularly with black and white as secondary colors—it just looks like a clash.
15. Astana Qazaqstan (Manufactured by Limar)
This picture is from Tirreno-Adriatico, don’t shoot the messenger.
Astana is one of the very few pro cycling teams with consistent sponsorship, and as a result consistent branding. And the light blue and gold of the Kazakh flag usually makes for a pretty nice uniform. I’m just bored by the helmet here.
14. UAE Team Emirates (Manufactured by MET)
I don’t hate this design. Despite being comically wide, it’s well-proportioned. But the tail is a little too 90s, and the air vents leave me feeling lukewarm. I either want something big and bombastic like the BMW grill intake we’ve seen on EF’s POC-manufactured helmets the past few years, or something delicate and streamlined. This puts me in mind of an apple core.
13. Movistar (Manufactured by ABUS)
12. Alpecin-Deceuninck (Manufactured by Canyon)
I spent like five minutes staring at these pictures trying to make sure that the Movistar and Alpecin-Deceuninck helmets weren’t the same. The manufacturers are different, but I had to check to see if this was just a branding exercise, or if there were actual differences between the two.
These helmets are both smiling at me. I don’t know if I like it. I don’t know if it’s a friendly smile or a sinister one. Is it the welcoming grin of a cartoon robot or the performatively soulless Cheshire cat smile of Space Fascism? I really don’t know. Either way, given the choice between the two, I think the little bump around the crown of Alpecin-Deceuninck’s helmets gives them the edge.
11. EF Education-EasyPost (Manufactured by POC)
I hate to do this to cycling’s most aesthetic team, but I’m bored. I expect more from the outfit that gave us the duckbill hypebeast helmet.
10. Ineos Grenadiers (Manufactured by Kask)
One of the OG short-wheelbase (as it were) time trial helmets was the Kask Bambino. The praying mantis-like silhouette cut by Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome in black helmet and yellow skinsit has become iconic in its own right. So despite not being any more interesting than some of the lids I’ve badmouthed here, I think this helmet’s enduring association with Ineos (and previously Sky) makes it classic rather than boring.
But then again, this is about the future. The gigantic integrated visor is definitely futuristic—it cries out to be worn at the helm of a spacefaring torpedo bomber—but we’ve seen this before.
9. Cofidis (Manufactured by EKOÏ)
Same helmet manufacturer as Arkéa, and same basic team colors. From this angle you can really see the severe inward angle around the crown of the helmet. Attaching the visor there makes it look like the rider’s head is shaped like a light bulb.
But man, what a difference the white jersey sleeves make, and the red stripe on the helmet. Little touches like that can take a helmet from boring to dynamite.
8. Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale (Manufactured by Van Rysel)
This is just a nice, clean design. Crisp, white color with a big, mirrored visor. I don’t know who this is grimacing in the wind (I like to think I know a fair bit about cycling but I can’t tell riders apart by their gums), but you could transplant that face onto an alien planet covered in frozen methane, or to the bowels of a dystopian tower block as in Judge Dredd.
7. Intermarché-Wanty (Manufactured by Uvex Sports)
I think Intermarché has the worst uniforms in pro cycling. Maybe in any professional sport. But for reasons I can’t really explain, I love this color on a time trial helmet.
6. Lidl-Trek (Manufactured by Bontrager)
And here we have the opposite. Love the helmet, hate the color scheme. Again, white helmets on a kit with no white on it: Not good. But this helmet is so comically wide, the visor stretching from ear to ear, that it has an appealing campiness to it. Imagine these bikes are some kind of floating futuristic motorcycle, and these guys are bumbling techno-cops on the way to not solve a crime. I can hear the kazoo cover of “Ride of the Valkyries” already.
5. Groupama-FDJ (Manufactured by Julbo)
Yes, this is a proper wide helmet. Jayco-Alula’s helmets were made by Giant; these were made for giants. It looks like Brian Robinson’s Washington Commanders cap. In the future, we will all have 20-pound brains and heads the size of beach balls, and this will be the kind of headgear cyclists wear.
4. Soudal-Quick Step (Manufactured by Specialized)
3. Bora-Hansgrohe (Manufactured by Specialized)
So Movistar and Alpecin-Deceuninck looked like they had the same helmets. These are the same helmets.3 And while they’ve got a lot of the upside-down punch bowl elements of your typical contemporary time trial helmet, only the curvature of the helmet stops and you get this flat (at least on the horizontal axis) section at the peak of the helmet.
I don’t know if that looks good, or what the aerodynamic implications are exactly, but it’s weird in exactly the kind of way a sci-fi TV production designer would use to highlight that this world is not our world. This helmet is everyone smoking cigars indoors all the time on Battlestar Galactica.
2. Bahrain-Victorious (Manufactured by Rudy Project)
God dam this is the good shit. The ridiculous camo pattern, the World War I German infantry-style flare around the base of the helmet, the mail slot cooling vent, the hysterically wide visor.
It really underscores how complicated aerodynamics is. I thought getting streamlined was about being as small as possible, but you can literally see his ears here. Apparently, the key is to create a giant hood that scoops air around the rider—like to the point where the helmet would keep your shoulders dry in the rain.
1. Team Visma-Lease a Bike (Manufactured by Giro)
But this is the winner. It’s the reason we’re having this discourse. From this angle, you can get a sense that the helmet is governed by some kind of frontal protuberance. The conical visor is a bit ridiculous too, especially given how far it goes down. But you can’t tell that a narwhal could wear this helmet comfortably.
Okay, maybe not, because the front crumple zone is full of foam. I guess it would be, seeing as how this is a bike helmet. I forgot about that for a second.
Doesn’t this throw off riders’ balance? Or how about this: The helmet sticks out that far in front because it’s made to be worn with the rider ducking his head down near his forearms. What happens if he picks his head up in a strong crosswind? Feels like the wind could catch under the visor and blow him away like Mary Poppins. These guys don’t weigh that much!
Having this rhino-style helmet opens up a world of possibilities. They should give these things out for long airplane rides, and have a corresponding slot in the seat in front of you so you can lean forward and nap. You could store water in the front bulb of these helmets, or use them to headbutt potential rivals for prey, territory or mates.
That’s evolution. Or at least it would be, if the UCI weren’t determined to save its teams from looking like idiots.
All non-embedded Instagram photos are by Billy Ceusters of ASO.
When Marco Pantani won the Giro-Tour double on a Bianchi in 1998, his Mercatone Uno team had jerseys that matched the bike, and it looked fantastic.
You can’t see it that well in these pictures, but Specialized also makes a sort of face sock/ear flap thing for its time trial helmets that the UCI is banning on the grounds that it looks stupid, with some other pretense conjured up as cover.