Friday, January 7, 2011

Team Leopard-Trek, a.k.a. Luxembourg - the return of aesthetic sanity


You know it doesn't take much, just a flicker, and the hope returns. We're just days into 2011 and the newest (sorta) pro UCI team, Team Leopard-Trek's (a.k.a Team Luxembourg), presentation of their new kits dramatically reverses, thank god, a trend of hideous kit design that reached its pinnacle (or pit) in the flesh-colored disaster of Team Footon >>>>>.
After three decades of downward spiral from the neon glare of the 1980's to the non-design design of recent teams, e.g. Radioshack and Sky, there may be a return to kits that will assume their place among the classics - Pegueot, Molteni, Formaggio, for example, of years past.

Cancellara, Schleck brothers, et als on the new team will be sporting a simple elegant - old fashion - white body, black upper, spliced by a light azure strip. And in the greatest time machine journey back, one that would delight Mssr. Degrange, the sponsors, Trek and team manager Brian Nygaard's management company Leopard assume a tasteful - read "small" - presence on the side panels. Other corporate logos are again 'tastefully' placed on the upper black panel right and left - Craft and Mercedes.

Finally for the jersey collector in all of us, the riders will have their monikers enscribed on the jersey collar - replicating a move Team Sky began last season (Sky's one good move - see the general kit design disaster "Keep It Simple Stupid."

Score one for history, for style, for taste, for aesthetic sanity, thank you Brian Nygaard.

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