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The Style of Rapha Condor Sharp

_{WORDS: Tom Southam | PHOTOS: Jon Bergman}

We used to be such a good looking team. When I first joined Rapha Condor (as it was known then) in 2009, we didn’t have a disagreeable face amongst us. However, there must be some sort of correlation between looks and performance because it took us a long time to win a single race that year, and while the team's looks may have changed somewhat over the years, we have certainly won a lot more races.

I am, of course, joking. However, there is an element of truth in this: one of the reasons I was attracted to Rapha Condor (and hopefully this went both ways) was the fact that it always stood for more than being just another bike team. There was – and still is – an ethos running through its core that was about more than just the ugly truth of getting a bicycle across the finish line first.

The real beauty of this team, to my mind, has always been what it represented outside the confines of the bike race. Bike racing is straightforward enough: it is simply a matter of training hard, making the appropriate sacrifices and then being as ruthless as you can in competition. That much we all know, it is a constant theory found throughout the history of the sport. What’s interesting are the individuals, teams and organisations that manage to add something of their own to this formula, to change part of the landscape or make people think in a way they hadn’t done before.

In my opinion Rapha Condor, and more recently Rapha Condor Sharp, has managed to do this not simply on a sporting basis but also on another level: the team, as a vehicle for the ethos of the its founding sponsors, has had an impact on the philosophy of the peloton as a whole.

Rapha Condor Recycling and later Rapha Condor Sharp are, I believe, responsible in part for improving the recent development of British domestic racing. British racing has had a long tradition of being a pale imitation of racing on the Continent. There was not the infrastructure, nor the culture that allowed racing on British roads to be anything more than a weird sideshow. The racing bore only a strange resemblance to the ‘real’ racing on the Continent: which was always a much faster, bigger and better organised affair. Aside from the difficulty of holding races on busy unclosed roads, the obvious difference to me was that there were no real teams in Britain, and races made no sense tactically because they were between a hundred individuals instead of twelve teams of seven riders.

Races were an archaic affair. Teams would set off flat out until a ten or fifteen-man group would get a gap in the first ten miles. Then, with no organisation behind the race, it would simply become a long, plodding procession where the front riders wore each other down until they drifted in, one by one, across the line. The bunch would roll in half an hour later full of disgruntled riders complaining about a lack of cohesion in the chase. Nonsense.

In 2008, John Herety, a former UK national team manager with years of experience racing against European professional and national teams, became one of the few dedicated professional managers in UK road racing. From there, John immediately began to discipline his young riders in how a team should race, how a race is made in the final hour (and not in the first ten miles) and how racing as a cohesive unit is a much more effective use of manpower.

The beauty of this of course was that, as a result, other riders and teams had to change their ways in order to compete and slowly but surely British domestic racing has changed. Races are no longer won by individuals who can grind out 100 miles in 53×12: more and more riders are becoming full-time racers to be able to compete and teams are being set up with good sponsors who understand the level of commitment required. Because of this, the sport’s stock has risen significantly, such that we can start to believe that there is a genuine ‘professional’ tier of cycle racing in this country.

The distinctive look of the Rapha Condor Sharp pro team is something else that has always set the team apart. The all black design has, in the past five years, become a recognised classic. From the moment the Rapha Condor team sponsored its first riders in 2006 to the present day, the kit (and therefore the look of the team) has remained true to its original concept. It has not been compromised for sponsors, staying with the highly recognisable and remarkably simple black and white design from day one. Other teams still look on enviously, our attitude and style working harmoniously for the success of all.

Riding for the Rapha Condor team in France could often be quite annoying. There exists in France a culture of jersey swapping that simply doesn’t happen anywhere else. And I, being one of the few French speaking riders in the team had, at each and every race we competed in over three years, several tentative approaches a day from riders desperate to get the shirt off of my back.

For someone who has an intrinsic need to keep people happy this proved very hard. I would, invariably, have given away all of my caps after about five stages of the Tour of Normandy (one particular recipient of an old cap of mine happened to win the espoir World Champs this year). I also had to deal with a barrage of emails from riders, post-race, all offering me a full kit swap at the end of each season. In one peculiar instance, several riders knocked on my hotel room door to try on my kit so they knew what size to order online.

To put it simply, this team always made a point of looking better than any other. And this made us a better known and a much more respected outfit. It gave us stature beyond, on occasion, our actual cycling prowess. Any time an organisation comes up with something that puts them ahead then others will inevitably follow – and follow they have. In a few short years the face of the peloton has become bereft of cluttered sponsors logos, the lines have all become clean and the colour palette of bike teams has changed to one of simpler, less gaudy colours.

The modest but undeniable genius of Rapha Condor is that they did it first without referencing anyone else, bar the essential history of the sport that the team is now indisputably a part of.