The Explainer – Too much yellow?
- By Charles Pelkey
- Published Jan. 21, 2009
- Updated Nov. 3, 2009 at 11:50 PM UTC
Explainer,
While the new Columbia kit may represent good graphic design, why does the Tour de France (Amaury Sport Organization) and the UCI, for that matter, allow yellow uniforms? With Saunier Duval already among the 189 riders that constitute the TDF peloton, even an informed television viewer has a difficult time trying to spot the maillot jaune. Why add nine more yellow jerseys to the melee? On the other hand, I suppose there is some solace to be found in Crédit Agricole’s demise as we may finally be able to pick out the points leader.
Steven Kemp
Park City, Utah
Dear Steven,
It was much simpler back in the early days of the Tour when most everyone wore relatively bland jerseys and the race leader sported a green armband. Well, simpler but not easy to spot.
Let’s start with just a quick bit of history, before we jump into the question of this year’s new crop of yellow. The original maillot jaune was introduced in the 1919 Tour de France, well after the first Tour in 1903. Eugène Christophe was awarded the first-ever yellow jersey by Tour founder Henri Desgrange. The color choice, as you know, reflected the hue of the newspaper L’Auto, which sponsored the race and eventually evolved into L’Equipe, now printed on white paper.
The current jersey sponsor, Crédit Lyonnais, has had its logo attached to the maillot jaune since the 1987 Tour.
The color of the jersey is quite specific and therein lays the rub. The organizers of the Tour de France “retain the option” of asking a team whose jersey color is “too similar” to that of the maillot jaune to change its design for that event.
The most recent examples come from the 1990s when two teams were asked to come to the Tour in colors different from their stock kits. The racing kits of the Spanish ONCE team and Italy’s Mercatone Uno each sported a variant of yellow that Tour organizers deemed to be too close to the yellow jersey of the race leader. Each opted to switch their respective team colors to pink, not coincidentally the color of the leader’s jersey of the Giro d’Italia.
Interestingly, the rule doesn’t apply to the team time trial, an event in which an entire team of yellow-clad riders won’t cause confusion. So, there were several examples of ONCE riding the Tour’s TTT in yellow and then taking on individual road stages in pink.
As we said, it’s purely a judgment call left to the organizers of the Tour. In 2000, for example, ONCE was permitted to compete in its standard season-long road kit, because organizers concluded that the jersey’s new black highlights lessened the confusion.
It’s that latitude that allowed the yellow-red-black-and-white jerseys of Saunier Duval to be used in recent Tours. It’s also, we suspect, what will allow the largely yellow, but multicolored Columbia jerseys to be used in this year’s Tour.
As for Crédit Agricole, again, it was the white and red highlights — quite substantial in that team’s case — that eliminate potential confusion between those jerseys and the green sprinter’s jersey sponsored by SMU.
Thus far, no team has toed the line in anything that could remotely cause confusion between its kit and the polka-dot climber’s jersey, by the way.
Of course, in 2009 the Columbia kit won’t cause too much confusion as far as other teams are concerned. Saunier Duval – thanks to Ricardo Riccò and friends – is no more.
Frankly, the old Mercatone Uno and Saunier Duval jerseys never really caused us a lot of confusion. It was that recent explosion of similarly colored blue jerseys that left us trying to catch a glimpse of a race number in hopes of distinguishing between individual riders from Quick Step, Milram, Columbia and others whose kits looked quite similar at a distance.
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Charles Pelkey
Charles Pelkey joined VeloNews in 1994 after serving as press secretary for former GOP Whip Alan K. Simpson in the U.S. Senate. Pelkey has worked as a journalist since 1985 and held a number of editorial positions at VeloNews including Senior Editor of VeloNews.com. Pelkey earned a JD from the University of Wyoming College of Law and lives in Laramie, Wyoming, with Diana, his wife of 25 years, and their two children, Philip and Annika, whose presence serves as a constant reminder of what really matters. Pelkey left VeloNews in July, 2011, but continues to be a regular contributor. Charles can now be found at liveupdateguy.com