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Sunday 8 February 2009

British Cycling play mind-games - Team Grumpy to follow suit?

The news that British Cycling has shredded the skinsuits used by its highly successful Olympic squad is a particularly neat piece of mind-gaming. As cyclingnews.com reports (British Cycling going to extremes),

[...] the track riders' skinsuits have been shredded to prevent them from falling into the hands of their rivals, who might then attempt to copy them. Britain intends to use the suits again at its home London Olympics in 2012.

"Those suits were created by British Cycling and Adidas put the labels on," he said, but the actually sewing was outsourced for further security. "Our skin suits were sent out to Japan so that the person who put them together in Japan did not know where they were from and there was no link."

Right. And the eight gold medals in track events at the Beijing Olympics are entirely explicable by a highly technical fabric.The effective training programme played no part?

I reckon this is just a diversionary tactic, and it's one that Team Grumpy should learn from. In a winter where our training has been low volume (and in Grumpy Bob's case, rather disrupted), some mind-games might be our only option. "Grumpy" Art Vanderlay's desire for a new wardrobe of skinsuits should now be revisited, and the new "stealth" skinsuits should indicate the highly technical nature of their construction, possibly via some "inconspicuous, yet highly visible" graphics.

1 comment:

Art Vanderlay said...

I've been working on a new project involving clingfilm. My reasoning here is that, as it is entirely transparent, then I can deliver a stunning knock out blow to the opposition during my warm up.

I did trial a prototype the other day, but had just had a complete body shave. This caused some onlookers to compliment me on my impressive 'King of the Montains' suit (pure white with red spots).

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