March 9th’s Milan San Remo opened the season spectacularly as Gerard Ciolek connived his way to a win after five hours in snow, rain, and wind so cold much of the peleton abandoned a commissar-shortened race.

Part of the spectacle, rightly pointed out by blogger Inrng.com, was the fact that, while modern cyclists ride $10,000 bicycles made of aerospace composites, they wear clothing that simply doesn’t work.

Racers struggled to remove and replace freezing soggy gloves. Jackets billowed, while tights and jerseys became sogged and sagged with chilled water. Professional sufferers such as multiple Paris Roubaix champion Tom Boonen abandoned because the cold was too much.

Typically, and as usual, the most primitive piece of clothing on riders bodies could be found on their heads.

Commonplace were ordinary, team-issue cotton cycling caps. Technological innovation, meanwhile, consisted of a shower-cap-like improvised helmet cover that ended up looking like a plastic bag had accidentally blown onto the riders head.

Thankfully,  most cyclists – even ones who occasionally get caught in the rain, aren’t paid to suffer, and don’t have to make do with chintzy, logo-adorned caps covering the most important area of their bodies.

Gobha-Clothing’s all-weather reversible soft-shell hat is warm in the freezing weather,  comfortable once you warm up, and impervious to wind.

If only Pro Tour team managers had known.

As we suffer through the fetid crisis brought on by a certain Austin cyclist, it’s worth recognizing that bicycling is also still a source of the sublime. In that spirit, David Gill noted on the web-page for the finale of the Peak Season Cyclocross Series that the January 27 race would also serve as the 2013 Santa Cruz County Cyclocross Championships.

The “highest placed Santa Cruz County resident in each category is awarded the coveted hat,” the race instructions said.

http://www.cyclocross.cx/6.html

Coveted hat is a term they apparently use in Santa Cruz for a Gobha-Clothing merino casquette with our trademark Santa Cruz equilateral cross crown. 2013 is the second year running Gill has reached out to us to buy an order of caps to award category winners; we’d already heard from a couple of Santa Cruz Countychampions who said they loved their hats, and wanted to buy whatever other styles we had.

Providing Santa Cruz winners with our hats is a special honor, because Santa Cruz is the birthplace of American-style cyclocross. And it has its own place in our heart because during the late 1970s and early 80s, we devoted our winters to cyclocross races in Surf City, winning the 1981 California state junior championships there, and getting second there in the senior state championships the following year.

http://www.sfweekly.com/content/printVersion/317818/

The second place was a bit of a hollow victory, however; we were actually the third person across the line. Legendary American cyclocross pioneer Lawrence Malone was second, behind perennial national champion Clark Natwick. Malone had turned pro to race in Europe, however, and the state championships only counted for amateurs.

http://www.cxmagazine.com/laurence-malone-original-rebel-cyclocross-magazine-article

We’d gotten what during those years was a perennial consolation prize of being the first also-ran behind those giants of American cyclocross. They and Northern California star Joe Ryan made up the U.S. National Team at the world championship at Hanover Germany – where Malone became the darling of the global cycling press for his ability to bunny hop barriers. Between 1975 and 1987, Natwick and Malone together won eight national championships. We never beat Natwick, but one glorious day happenstance contrived to let us beat Malone in a non-championships Santa Cruz event in1983. We’d spent the whole race nipping his heels, and after we crossed the finish line, both of us collapsed. After we’d lay motionless for a few seconds, one of the spectators informed us we had another lap to go.We guess we were the first to hear her, because we rose to our bike first and held Malone off the whole lap for second place.

            Fair? Not exactly. But to paraphrase Lance Armstrong on Oprah Winfrey, it didn’t fit the dictionary definition of cheating, either.

In "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference," Malcolm Gladwell says  mysterious sociological changes accumulate toward a Big Bang -- "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."
In that spirit - we hope - H&M's has announced an 11-piece menswear collection for the urban cyclist coming March, 2013.
A fashion designer working on the project said:
"Cycling is a global phenomenon, with so many men choosing to cycle both to commute and for pleasure.”

They even made a movie about it.

Notes the magazine Grist.org:

Like all H&M clothes, they promise to be cheap and disposable, and you shouldn’t necessarily run out and buy them. But if being able to buy good-looking cycling clothes helps more people ride bikes — especially people who wouldn’t otherwise — that’s a plus. And if H&M is designing cycling clothes, it means that cycling is becoming more mainstream than would have seemed possible just a few years ago.

H&M is so enthusiastic about the marketing Karma it expects to garner from this, that they've gone the Helen Lovejoy route, producing a web-page explaining that they're making adult bike clothing for the sake of the children.

 The collection is set to launch March 7, 2013 as part of H&M’s “Conscious” label and will feature sustainable materials, such as organic cotton, recycled cotton, and recycled polyester.
That's where The Simpsons' Helen Lovejoy's "Think of the Children" tagline comes in. 
H&M's "Conscious" line includes a segment dubbed "All for ChildrenAll for Children", "which is set up to protect the rights of some of the poorest children in the world," according to H&M.
Children saved, H&M is turning to Mother Earth with its bike commuting line.
Point being, they're doing cycling clothing to get on the "green" bandwagon. 
This is not trustworthy:. The columnist Bike Snob NYC put it best when he suggested that people who get into cycling for the environmentalism would likely switch to pogo sticks if they were declared the next enviro-friendly transport mode.
Encouragingly, however, H&M's design staff apparently includes some avid cyclists.

The masses, apparently, are finally poised to get around by bike...
Um. Not like on the left. (Wouldn't mass-participation six-day racing be cool, though?) 
But H&M's gambit suggests people are moving by bike rather to the store, to work, to school, and for recreation.
That's good news. Independent speciality outdoor-wear companies have been toiling for this day.

There's reason to be skeptical, too, however.

The non-cycling fashion industry's attempts to clothe the self-propelled, however, has been littered with failure.

In 2009, the Fashion Institute of Technology and Louis Vuitton/Moët Hennessy (LVMH) sponsored a bike-commuting-clothing design contest based on the inactive-person's view popular at that time saying outdoor-wear looked ridiculous. The result: preposterous garments such as cycling-purposed ponchos. 
Yes. Ponchos.
At this time, Gobha-Clothing was taking root as your founder spent substantial savings on rolls of Schoeller Dynamic soft-shell fabric, bought dozens of fancy sweaters to cut up, (having not-yet forged a connection with Levana of New Zealand,) and spent hours and days obsessively snipping, stitching, sewing, disassembling, re-cutting, re-sewing, testing, and sewing again.

Unbeknownst to the Philistines at LVMH, your Gobha-Clothing founders knew that soon after a fledgling bike commuter takes to the streets, she focuses on practical function as much as beautiful appearance. 

Bicycling has very specific demands when it comes to weather, sweat and appearance. 
FIT Ponchos and their ignorance-borne ilk satisfy none of these.
Time went by, the LVMH event produced FIT-student winners and the obligatory New York Times article, but little in the way of propagating better cycling wear. 
Instead, real innovation was going on at the grass-roots. Knowledgeable, skillful textile pioneers such as Oakland's Nan Eastep, owner of B. Spoke Tailor in Oakland, plugged-away making beautiful clothing that was truly functional and practical for urban cycling.

In early 2012, Levi's jumped on the bandwagon, filling their entire, three-story-tall flagship Union Square store display window with mannequin cyclists and giant cycling murals, advertising their "Commuter" line. Their tag-line was, to be honest, quite empathetic: "Form, Function, Cycling."
By this time, Gobha, and her predecessor firm, DiSanto Clothing, had been making enthusiastically-received cycling hats based on the idea of using the finest-possible materials, completely original and distinct proprietary patterns, and a unique invention: the reversible soft-shell/Merino thermostat for your head.
And now, H&M, the archetypal cheapener of whatever mode of dress seems to have tipped the Zeitgeist, has seized upon the idea of bike clothes.
We wish them well.

For the cause of cycling and bicycle commuting to take root globally, cyclists of the world need to band together and help a certain Pennsylvania bike rider find a date.

While forward-looking cities such as San Francisco may have bicycle-themed dating scenes, other parts of the country can be matchmaking wastelands, suggests Brybot, a poster on a Pittsburg, PA bike-commuting bulletin board. 

Brybot's lifestyle choices might make him a hipster hottie in Berkeley or Brooklyn:

After a year here, and using my car so infrequently, I decided I might as well sell it. That way I could have the cash, not have to pay for insurance and yearly fees, and I wouldn't have to worry about the car falling apart in disuse on the side of the road. In the roughly four months since I sold the car, I've used Zipcar once to go to Greensburg for a concert. Otherwise, I've been able to do everything on the bike, save busing to the airport when necessary. Anyway, I consider this to be a huge financial gain on my part.


In Pittsburgh, however, some women view a man who gets around by bike as a loser.

The downside, which I recognized but may not have understood the true extent, is that girls (generally speaking) do not want to date a guy without a car! As sexy as I think I am on my bikes, it just doesn't cut it for some women. Tonight, I was talking to a girl, who as soon as she found out I didn't have a car decided it was a deal-breaker. I'm certain this is not the only case either. I already feel like a misfit in this town. I don't know what a Steeler or Penguin is, and I don't know how to say Yinz. Add the biking and not having a car, and I'm a total weirdo! =(
Has anyone else experienced anything similar, or am I the only one?

A social movement that interferes with its participants love lives is bound to fail. Witness the Shakers, a Christian sect that reportedly attracted 20,000 converts during the 19th century. They banned sex, however. Unable to reproduce, the faith disappeared.

Despite its rapidly growing popularity, Bicycle commuting lives a tenuous historical moment. Even in burgeoning San Francisco, around one-thirtieth of commuters go by bike. If the movement is to survive, it must reproduce. To reproduce, it needs to shed the capital "L" that seems to have attached to cyclists in the minds of certain Pittsburgh women. Obviously, Brybot should make the first move and purchase several  jaunty Gobha hats in colors that coordinate with  various outfits. 

The rest of us, however, need to help Brybot find someone to love. Women of Pittsburgh, we assign you to recognize the fitness, global-mindedness, practicality, economy and health of your city's cyclists. Date them. And watch the dream of a better world unfold.

Until thirty six years ago, there was no such thing as an American bike racer at the front of the European professional peloton. Until twenty four years ago, there had not been a U.S. based team winning top European races. Both are commonplace now.

One man was instrumental in producing both milestones. Neel finished 10th in the 1976 world professional road racing championships. In 1988, he coached US 7-Eleven team captain Andy Hampston to a Giro di Italia win. 

Neel is now only marginally employed, living in a remote California mountain valley, in a house he bought for $50. His story is one of an anguished character prone to extreme-seeming behavior who's spent a lifetime struggling to find purchase on the world.

As we close out a year in which bike racing has made headlines with new evidence detailing the alleged extreme behavior of a certain US post-office-sponsored squad of ex-champions, cycling pioneer Neel serves an example of the fact that extreme behavior may be cycling's price of entry.

Exhibits One and Two: the star witnesses in USADA's dossier accusing Lance Armstrong were Floyd Landis, whose acute case of non-conformism led him to flee his Amish community for life as a Southern California mountain bike racer, and Dave Zabriskie, who took to cycling as a refuge from his father's drug abuse.

"Happy, well-adjusted, shiny people do not race bikes at the highest level," said Rob Roll, discussing his days riding for the 1980s 7-Eleven Team coached by Neel.  "For someone to subject themselves to that, you have to be very screwed up. Everyone on that team was a knacker, a sociopathic reject, and it would have been very difficult to get along in normal society. To stay out of a mental institution, it was necessary to kill the dysfunctional background. You know you must be there racing. Until you kill the rage, you know you must be there."

The November 2012 issue of Pro Cycling features a profile of Neel, now-forgotten hero of the USA's 1976 arrival on the global cycling scene. His 10th place in that year's professional road championships, along with George Mount's Olympic 6th place that year, propelled America into the European big leagues.

For Neel cycling was an escape from the 1970s Haight Ashbury drug culture, which destroyed the lives of some of his youthful friends. He has a gentle, self-effacing yet erudite demeanor, but with a viper's strike in the realm of bike racing.

Right before his 10th place at the 1976 worlds, where he sprinted alongside greats such as Eddy Merckx, Neel had become one of America's first-ever European professionals, riding for the Magniflex squad sponsored by an Italian mattress company.

That didn't work out for long; as a Euro-domestique, the former U.S. star had no chance to shine. Thankfully, he had a fallback skill: As a youngster Neel worked as a horse groom. His husbandry skills matched a post-racing career as a coach.

Andy Hampsten, one of his charges, recalled Neel once became disgusted upon seeing a horse being trotted on pavement. That's bad for the hooves, Hampsten learned.

"He treated us like thoroughbreds," Hampsten recalled.

But before he rose during the mid-1980s to status as a world-beating coach, Neel spent several years behaving outrageously.

He launched a cycling-goods import business with his friend Lee Katz.

"He shoved the business and the warehouse up his nose," Katz said, referring to what Neel acknowledges was a freebase cocaine problem.

Neel's marriage fell apart.

"He's a good coach, but that's it," his ex-wife Lauren Sweezy said.

And he drove away family members who had sought to help him.

"He was a terror to be around," said his brother Larry Neel.

Neel got help back to his feet from cycling impresario Tom Ritchey, who's since also sponsored the personal redemption of 1970s champion and convicted child molester Jonathan Boyer.

 Ritchey gave Neel a job developing a dealer network for Ritchey bicycles. His job in a bike business inhabited largely by ex-jocks allowed him to refresh his contacts with bike-racing team managers.

By 1985, Neel coached 7-Eleven team captain Andrew Hampsten to a tactically-artful stage win in the Giro di Italia.

And in 1988, Neel nurtured Hampsten to one of the most storied victories in sport, where Hampsten endured a sleet-smothered ride over the Gavia Pass, taking enough time to eventually put him in the Giro di Italia's pink winner's jersey.

By 1989, the year after Hampsten's Giro win, Neel was making $90,000 per year, and was featured on increasingly-frequent television  cycling broadcasts as the soft-spoken, multi-lingual master-schemer behind the 7-Eleven stores-sponsored America's Team.

In the 2004 book "L.A. Confidentiel: Les secrets de Lance Armstrong," anti-doping journalist David Walsh wrote that, despite Neel's own recreational-drug-abusing past, the 7-Eleven coach ran one of the European peleton's rare non-doping teams.

"Neel managed an irreproachable medical program that reflected their conception of the sport," wrote Walsh, a writer famed for publicly indicting riders he believes to have doped.

During a 1989 cross-Europe drive between races, Neel was put into a coma by a car crash. 

The resulting brain damage meant he couldn't handle the demands of team management. He ended up working construction, and by his own admission behaving erratically, before eventually getting his bearings back and signing up to coach a series of second and third tier cycling teams.

Those jobs became successively less viable. 

A strong US based team sponsored by the Spago restaurant chain fell apart during the early 1990s with riders purportedly stiffed of salaries. He later coached a women's team sponsored by Timex, and a regional men's team sponsored by the Sierra Nevada Brewery.

[Adversisement]

Now, according to talented Northern California journalist Gary Boulanger, author of the Nov. 2012 Pro Cycling article, Neel isn't coaching these days. He's getting by on occasional  construction jobs, and any other mountain money-making enterprises he can conjure. Given ample downtime, Neel rides a seven-year-old Belgian-branded bicycle every day, Boulanger writes.

Perhaps it's an apropos life for a man once famed for coaching a successful squad of "knackers." 

After Neel's Spago debacle, he went back to his home in Siskiyou County and spent a good part of the year going on 100 mile bike rides, despite the fact his family was broke.

Zabriskie, in his USADA testimony describes going on bike rides and later achieving success at racing as an exhilarating escape from a troubled home life. Armstrong so resented his no-show father that he instructed relatives on his dad's side to never contact him. It's possible to imagine that Armstrong's life, too, started to seem better once his brain was deprived of oxygen during five-hour rides.

There's something noble, even beautiful, about the fact cycling attracts and uplifts people with such needs. 

It shouldn't be a surprise, though, that some cycling veterans later-life rides are swiped with existential road rash.

[ And please remember -- buy a Gobha hat! ]

This handsome gentleman was kind enough to model our hats in the Bike Expo Pedal Savvy Fashion Show. Yes, he looks wonderful. After the show, he himself decided he liked this look and bought himself a grey and black reversible rain hat.

Here is one of our beautiful customers from the San Francisco Bike Expo sporting a baby blue and black casquette. Yes, he already looked good without the hat, but with the hat, his allure is complete!

Our merino wool hails from Levana Textiles, located in Levin, a small textile town in New Zealand, nestled between the rugged Tararua Ranges and the Tasman Ocean. It would be hard to find cleaner air and water than this region provides. This purity goes into the merino wool they produce, which is 100 percent chemical free.

Levana has very stringent quality control.  The company conducts strict laboratory tests to examine fabric for any faults and to make sure it meets international standars. Levana is an Invista accredited mill, and is also proudly ISO 9001 certified — an international qualification awarded to companies who meet strict Quality Management System criteria.

In this period where consumers cannot claim ignorance when it comes to our impact on the environment, we focused on using only wool that is 100% natural and renewable.  The wool we use is supplied by farmers who are verified to use only organize production, reducing the environmental impact. The sheep are also treated humanely, without the brutal museling procedure used by many wool producers.

Target Audience

Gobha's all-weather hat is the little-black dress of cycling wear -- a garment fit for any and every occasion. Whether you're on your way to a fund-raising cocktail with green-minded bike-commuting activists, going on a weekend spin with well-equipped century-riders, joining a hammer-fest with your bike racing buddies, or sipping latte's with a crew of fixie-fashionistas, the Gobha hat will help you fit in.


Under ordinary circumstances, belonging to one of these in-crowds involves filling one’s closet with a particular type of clothing. A typical commuter gearhead will have pants designed to perform well during a 25-minute bike commute while being comfortable and good looking for 8 hours at the office – concerns that don’t interest the recreational cyclist. Her closet is filled with high-performance Lycra wear she’ll change out of as soon as the ride is done.

A Gobha reversible all-weather hat, however, goes in all these closets. Bicycling hats of the Gobha style are an urban fashion signifier, yet derive their silhouette from European bike-racing wear. That means a fixie-fashionista, who haunts coffee shops flaunting a single-speed bicycle, $300 selvedge jeans and an exclusive-graphic-design-sporting t-shirt, will, if he's in the know, wear one piece of performance sportswear – a Belgian-style cap. And we happen to make the best ones available in the hip San Francisco Mission/SoMa District borderlands.

Typical non-cyclist outdoors people, meanwhile, might own a closet filled with unrelated items such fly-fishing vests, or yachting shoes, backpacking boots, or cross-country skis. Each of these sportspeople would be well served with a Gobha hat, however, because of our product’s unique ability to keep out the rain and wind, wick sweat to keep wearers dry and not overly warm, and otherwise regulate outdoor-sports body temperature better than any other garment they own.

A typical highly-dedicated commuter-activist in this town belongs to the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, and rides her bike to work, to go shopping, camping, partying, and to do anything else that requires a trip of 20 miles or less. If she were to describe herself on a deep personal level, one of the first four words she’d use would be “cyclist.”

She owns three up-to-the moment bicycles worth $3000 or so each, each equipped with fashionable bent-wood fenders, hand-welded racks, and an assortment of colorful panniers that double as shopping bags and briefcases. She also owns a wardrobe of specialty urban cycling gear such as $180 Swrve soft-shell pants with $45 locally-made pedalpanties underneath, a $120 Chrome zip sweater over an $80 Outlier shirt, $25 Smartwool socks and $350.00 Sidi ratchet-buckle cycling shoes.

These possessions don’t reflect wealth, but rather carefully curated taste. This is part of a set of values that includes being concerned about global warming and her personal role in it, and it entails engaging with her husband, with friends, and professional colleagues in topics such as urban design and green business practices.

These types of cyclists are part of a social and civil engineering movement chronicled in books such as Jeff Mapes’ recent “Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities.” And they’re part of a virtuous cycle in which cities are hitching their prospects to attract America’s young intelligentsia by building cycling infrastructure, and more and more previously car-bound people join what’s becoming seen as a coming cultural shift.

The Gobha reversible cycling cap is tailored for this crowd. It’s designed to allow a bike commuter to survive a 20-minute squall without getting her hair wet, or leave home in freezing weather, and warm up without breaking a sweat. More than any garment a customer such as Mia could own, the Gobha product will help keep her arriving by bike at a client site dry, comfortable, and looking good.

These customers appreciate the unique fashionable tailoring, the Gobha one-of-a-kind cross pattern, and commuter-gearhead luxury taste signifiers such as Merino wool, Schoeller soft-shell fabric, and 1960s Belgium cycling hat styling.

Serious recreational cyclists
Emmaus Pennsylvania Magazine editor Bill Strickland is an obsessive cyclist who considers “cyclist” an apt descriptor of his personality, values, and achievements. He might also add physique, and other biophysical performance measures. Bill owns many thousands of dollars worth of bicycles, bicycling clothing and accessories. But it’s not likely he’d ever run into Mia day to day. When Bill gets up at 6 a.m. and begins putting bicycling clothing on, he’s not preparing for a trip for the office, but for a workout designed to nudge the watts per kilogram his bike-riding body can produce closer to his magical goal of 5.1.

In the spring Bill packs his kit-bag and loads his bike on the car to drive to century rides – 100-mile catered events where one might find 3000 people each of whom will bring along a bicycle, clothes and accessories costing more than $6000. In the fall, he might ride a few races in a muddy bicycle-racing sport called cyclocross, which calls for owning multiple sets of $4000 wheel, each mounted with hand-made bike tires that cost $150 each.

In February, Strickland wrote an online column for Bicycling Magazine about why our product is the best available for his tribe.

One layer is water-repellent, windproof Schoeller fabric; the other is Merino wool. I’ve started long rides in 37-degree rainstorms with the Schoeller side out to stay dry, pulled the cap off while pedaling, turned it inside-out and ridden comfortably with the wool side out once the deluge stops, flipped up the lining that covers the ears and back of the head when the sun came fully out from the clouds, then switched back to water-resistant mode as gloom and rain came on again — ideal temperature management throughout a five-plus-hour ride that varied by more than twenty degrees in conditions from sideways cannon-blasts of near-hail to eye-squinting sun.

I don’t know why this one works so well. I’d expected the Schoeller layer to trap sweat when it was turned inside and lay against my head. But somehow it breathes or wicks or performs whatever the latest performance nomenclature is.

And it looks good. (The cut is a modified, trimmer version of those traditional, high-peaked Belgian-style thick wool caps. You can get it comfortably under a helmet without re-adjusting the straps.)

The Bill Stricklands of the world care about performance, looks and quality. But their dresser doesn’t necessarily contain urban-cycling-wear-style brands such as Swrve and Chrome. It’s stuffed with Euro-styled racing wear, consisting of $250.00-apiece cycling shorts and jerseys, and $450.00-apiece jackets and leggings, made by companies such as Capo, Castelli and Assos.

Gobha products appeal to this taste for high-performance garments, as described in Strickland’s column. And it fits their notion of what bicycling clothing should look like, with a European bike-racer style cut, modified to fit and perform much better than traditional cycling garments do.