Champion Jerseys

Not that many (well, none really) of you care, but in cycling there is this great little tradition of wearing a special jersey that designates you as a specific champion for that year. You're only allowed to wear these special jersey's while competing in that discipline, so for example, since Dave Zabriskie is the current US Time Trial Champ every time he competes he wears his Captain America look-a-like skin suit. But he can only wear it in time trials. It can have a Captain America theme because basically the teams are given a lot of free reign over design as long as it incorporates the countries colors. I couldn't find a good picture of Dave's skin suit but this picture sort of gives you an idea:



The current US Road Champion is Tyler Hamilton. Tyler races for Rock Racing who's title sponsor is the high end fashion company, Rock and Republic. Rock's whole premise is to be flashy and give off a punk rock vibe. The first year they raced, 2007, they had the baddest kit I'd ever seen. It's actually the kit I copied as closely as I could when designing the eye pleasing "B Sample Racing" kit that everyone loves. In 2008 the rock kits were pretty ugly save for a few of the special kits they wore in specific races. Cycling, being about 90% fashion anyway, couldn't help but wonder what Rock Racing would come up with for a National Champion Road kit for Tyler to wear this year. The Tour of California, the biggest race on US soil seemed like the perfect place to show case it, but, it turned out to be more of the same from Rock Racing and they seem to not have their shit together. The US Champ kit that Tyler was wearing looked EXACTLY like the kit everyone else was wearing save for a few stars, a red and white striped background on the Rock and Republic shield and red, white and blue stripes on the sleeve bands. Look VERY closely and you can see the aforementioned details:



WTF mate? You are a fashion company for crying out loud! You can't do any better than that? I'm not even going to get into the fact that the kits get worse on a yearly basis. This one looks like it was inspired by a goth cashier at Hot Topic!

But, today I was on velonews.com reading an update on the current Vuelta Mexico and there it was, a picture of Tyler in an actual national champion kit that looks different from the rest of his teams. It's still insanely ugly but at least it's mainly red, white and blue. At least you can tell what it's supposed to be. And probably best of all, it looks like the goth cashier was having a good day when they went back into Hot Topic for further inspiration.



I guess the good thing is Tyler now has a legit national champ kit to race in, but way to drop the ball and unveil this new kit in Mexico. There are rumors that Michael Ball, the owner of Rock and Republic, can only fund the team through June or July, but we'll see. I think they're actually doing a good job of cutting back on expenses. This year the team cars were only Cadillacs (and not even Escalades) instead of Lambos like they've had in the past! Maybe they simply couldn't afford to rush the shipping on the kit they only had all off season to design and order.

And while I'm busting Rock's chops I'm actually a pretty big fan of the team. I think they're interesting and I think it's great they've given some guys a second chance after they did their time in cycling's rehabilitation program of extended vacation without pay. Here's to hoping that Rahsaan Bahati's US Crit Championship kit arrives on time. But with the budget cuts he might just have to borrow Tyler's.