Who is Responsible for Manscaping in Professional Cycling???

Look, let’s face it, there have always been cyclists who fancied themselves a bit, and played up to the crowd with their good looks. Clearly Jacques Anqitil and Rudi Aldig thought they were pretty hot stuff back in the day and perhaps spent a little too long in front of the mirror some mornings.

This was however contrasted by the fact that cycling was a hard working man’s sport and most cyclists were, how should we say, pretty rough around the edges. You might want to scrub up a bit for a special occasion, but this was a little bit like making an effort to clean up before you went to church – it was a socially accepted expectation.

Clearly when Francesco Moser came along, the game started to change, greater media coverage and the increasing value placed on the cosmopolitan meant that Moser started to create a template for the young up and comers that was as much about how you looked doing it as what you actually did. Make no mistake Franky was a hard arse and so there was respect and jealousy mixed in with the contempt for his swarthy Mediterranean looks.

This started to create a cultural divide. Hard working men with rough heads in Belgium, and good looking nancy boys in Italy. The French went a bit 50/50 as is their custom. All this fed into a change in the demographic of the average peddler in the new cycling countries, where cycling was becoming a bit of a rich boys sport and rich boys want to look the part.

With Fabio Baldato things started to get a bit out of hand, it is here that I believe the real manscaping issue started. Maurizio Fondriest had passed the baton of good looking Italian cyclist onto Fabio, and Fabio decided that he was going to start going for the sculptured goatee and oiled hair overkill. While Fabio was sprinting down one side of the barriers (a hazard I might say with the amount of slippery hair product being sloshed around), Mario Chipollini was fostering a ridiculous Glenn Close like perm down the other.

So next time you see Phillipo Pozatto looking like a picture of what would be in a dictionary entry for “Metrosexual”, you have a slightly better idea of how we got to this sad place.