Dr Hutch

Will the UCI ban Giro's wacky new TT helmet for being too weird, wonders the Doc, and if so, will the response be weirder still?

There are few things I enjoy more in cycling-land than the arrival of a new time trial helmet. There's a wet ParisRoubaix. There's watching the Tour on Alpe d'Huez. But I love most our capacity for over-reaction, and for over-reaction a new TT lid tops all. But before we get to the latest offering from the comedymeisters at Giro's helmet division, we're going to have a brief diversion into a bewildering theatrical experience.

A few years ago someone took me to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. This is not a semi-Classic you've missed, it's a comedy ballet company.

Very skilled, hugely athletic, and very confusing. Their opening number proceeded for several minutes to a respectful silence. Then, for no reason at all, the whole audience (other than me) laughed, uproariously. More silence. Then more inexplicable hysterics. If you knew all about contemporary ballet apparently the jokes were excellent. If you didn't, it was like watching an un-subtitled Russian sitcom.

This is bike helmets. To a non-cycling outsider, literally everything we as a sporting collective have put on our heads since we invented the bike has been mystifying and ridiculous. From the embroidered and badged club caps of the 19th century, to the beretta of the early 20th, to the ice-cream-seller casquette with the upside-down brim, to the bunch-of-bananas leather helmet of the 1970s and 80s and on to the many variations of re-purposed polystyrene packaging today.

Only if you are one of us can you not only accept these, but draw practical and aesthetic distinctions between them.