The 2010 Professional “shit kit” competition is on

Opening entries are from Team Radioshack and Omega Pharma Lotto.

Hitting it hard for the first batter up to the plate (baseball metaphor? WTF?) “The Shack” are putting it into the bleachers with this number.

Lance Armstrong RadioShack kit 2010

Where to begin?

  • The arbitrary nipple high divide making it look like a boobtube
  • The stuck in the 90s grey-on-grey patterning last seen looking pointless on the USPS kit
  • The use of grey in cycling kit

Note: Rich Land on twitter says “Grey along with denim should never be seen anywhere near cycling kit. I bet the podium cap is a Stetson”

Exception on the grey rule is the ACBB kit for historical reasons.

Meanwhile Omega-Pharma Lotto (isn’t that an american college fraternity/sorority?) seem to have tried to press home the finer details of melding the “brand imaging” of a national lottery to that of a pharmaceutical giant and driven their designer to despair.

Omega Pharma Lotto team kit 2010 modelled by Philip Gilbert

End result is that poor Pip and the gang are going to spent the whole of next season being labelled Colgate by the rest of the peloton. It’s either that or Aquafresh.

colgate toothpaste

I suppose you could excuse it by saying it resembled pharmaceutical packaging, but that’s like saying you prefer stubbing your toe to poking yourself in the eye.

And the worst thing about this all? There’s a whole load more of them to come :((((((( *cries*

Garmin Transitions: you just know that somewhere someone is thinking to themselves “You know we really should think about how we can represent the transitions thing with a gradient fade.” With light blue, orange and argyle checks.

Coco The Clown’s outfit is pretty “visible”, it doesn’t make it cool either.

Columbia-HTC: After last year’s spectacular win in the “winning races dressed up as lego” classification, can it actually get any worse? No chance that this year the Stapleton gang will be wearing something that makes them look less like cannon fodder in a badly conceived sci-fi series.

There’s a reason that lots of people bought last season’s Cervelo Test Team kit and it’s that it actually paid some attention to being wearable. And it did it without losing brand identity.

So if you spot any new kit, let me know so I can see just who is going to be the worst dressed team in the peloton next season.

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