When progress loses humanity

Our world has become increasingly digitised in recent decades. We’ve gone from vinyl records to streaming Bluetooth; from handbuilt craftwork to 3D-printing; and from friction shifting to electronic wireless groupsets. In case you don’t have a coach to assess your riding, AI is happy to tell you that you sucked on the hills today.

Each change has bought improvements of a sort. But there has been a loss. No doubt you know an audiophile who can’t help telling you about the superior warmth of a vinyl record; or a filmbuff who geeks out on films made with real celluloid.  There’s even a word for the nostalgic smell of used-bookshops – vellichor.  

These all demonstrate an appreciation for the full human experience that non-digital products offer – smell, touch, sight, and the imperfections that reflect on the human input behind them.

All this is just as relevant to the world of cycling. Who hasn’t taken a moment when putting new tyres onto their bike to appreciate ‘new tyre smell’? The gratifying sensation of threading a new gear cable through its housing and then tuning the derailleur through the time-honoured blend of art and science? The simple joy of successfully truing a wheel? Some of you may have even been lucky enough to watch a frame-builder brazing some Reynolds or Columbus tubing together.

These are all human endeavours – the combination of mental and physical skills, attended to by a unique collection of smells, sounds and sights.

Unfortunately much of these are being lost in cycling, as they are elsewhere in our lives. Just like streaming to records, carbon frames are superior to steel frames in every way but humanity.  Carbon wheels lack the feel of alloy rims, and now we even have electric pumps to replace the traditional road-side arm workout. Even the way we think about our rides has become digitised, dominated by wattage and training zones.

We’re not advocating to be luddites here, and we do appreciate the net performance and convenience gains all these developments have provided.

But what’s most galling is when a new development is actually a step backwards – we’re talking about you, polyester cycling jerseys! Demonstrably worse at regulating rider temperature and wicking sweat, somehow they keep on being worn, just as you can rely on them remaining unchanged even after decades in a landfill.

You know that ‘new tyre smell’ we referred to? Give a Soigneur jersey a deep sniff and you’ll largely be inhaling just natural lanolin and keratin. 

Inhale the scent of a polyester jersey (please don’t), and you’ll be taking in formaldehyde, azo dyes, pigment solvents, glycol ethers, silicone finishes, volatile petroleum distillates, acetates and organochlorine compounds. 

So do the world a favour – buy yourself another Soigneur merino jersey and help keep the ‘human’ in ‘humanity’.