Steve our local Paralympic Gold Medalist called round to pick up a 1485 Wool Jacket this week. As a professional cyclist he spends most of his time in Lycra. Luckily he has the physique to get away with it, unlike many of the specimens out there on the public roads! When he’s not dressed like a ninja, he’s in his gym kit or his pyjamas. It’s a tough life when you’re training all the time and sometimes he can’t even go to the pub! When he does go out into the normal world he said he’s a bit short on decent clothes.
He’s always off to medal ceremonies, celebrity lunches and public speaking engagements and he needed to smarten up his act. Born a Kiwi he’s quite happy wandering about barefoot, but having been a British resident for some time and now a proper Member of the British Empire he realised he needed to up his clothes game. He’s already got HebTroCo trousers and shorts, so as he says himself, “I’m alright from the waist down.” We’re sure the ladies would agree mate.
We think he looks great in his new jacket and we’re immensely proud that he’s chosen to wear HebTroCo gear. Hopefully he won’t wear his helmet with the jacket all the time.
Steve is a member of the Great Britain Cycling Team. He was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa in late 2011 and officially registered blind. He races on the track and road on a tandem with his pilot Adam Duggleby as well as competing in other endurance cycling events. The bike you see here has been designed for him by our own brant (he’s a bike boffin as well as a menswear mogul) and is a “fat bike” which is basically a mountain bike with massive tyres. The flotation of the pneumatics make it suitable for riding anywhere, including on snow or sand where narrower tyres would normally sink in and slow down. Steve uses it to train on and also competes in bonkers endurance races like the Rovaniemi 150, which he won earlier this year in the snowy wastes of arctic Lapland.
Steve and Adam won 2 gold and 1 bronze medals at the Rio Olympics in 2016. This year they were crowned track world champions winning the rainbow stripes at the Para-cycling World Championships in Brasil and a further gold at the Road World Champs in Italy.
