7/27/2011

When I am King: Racing Gear

When I am King...

We will all wear racing gear.

I love the fact that everyone on a casual bike ride wears a racing outfit, even though they’re not actually racing, unless it’s to the nearest Starbucks. “Last one there buys venti lattes!”

I think I actually see these spandex gangs more often at the cafe than in transit. But maybe that's just because they move so fast on the roads that I miss them.

Meanwhile, these racers are decked out in shirts so bright they don’t need headlights and shorts so tight they sing soprano around the turns. Their wraparound sunglasses can catch all of the bugs that will splatter at the blistering speeds of up to 10 mph that they’ll achieve on the way to the cafe, and they wear racing helmets that look like a silver slug, stretched slightly in the breeze. Their shoes clip into the pedals to ensure that if they are ever in an accident, they will avoid an painful injury by being clicked inseparably onto the bike thus dying immediately.

The best part about bike footwear is that it's basically tap shoes with clips. So when they do go down, they’ll go down dancing.

This entire kaleidoscopic ensemble is topped off by enough logos to populate a shopping mall. Real logo’d apparel is bad enough. You know the ones: the shirts, shorts, caps, and jockstraps that real athletes (that is, athletes we pay to see) wear to indicate that although they’ve never used the products, the companies that put them there pay them millions of dollars for the rights to make the athletes prostitute themselves.

The logos worn by the weekend workouters are somehow worse; they pay way more than a shirt is worth for the privilege of wearing the logo of one of these companies, so that the companies can turn around and pay it to the prostituting athlete, who then inspires fans and sycophants to go out and pay even more for such a shirt. Don’t they realize that the athlete isn’t wearing that shirt by choice, but because of her debilitating gambling habit? Or his massive alimony payments? If the athlete had a choice, they’d wear something a little more understated. Like solid gold.

Meanwhile, other sports aren’t suffering the same fate. I continue to see people out jogging with nothing more than a pair of shorts and functional shoes. Or out playing basketball in shorts and a t-shirt. Or shooting darts in the bar with nothing more than a dribbled-on polo shirt and a huge buzz. Clearly, these other sports have some work to do.

When I am King, all sports will require appropriately overachieving apparel. Runners will be required to wear shoes with wings and fake motion-blur. Basketball players will wear tank tops and shorts that hang down to the tops of their high-top shoes. Pickup games of touch football will require full tackling uniforms with mesh jerseys and a cooler of Gatorade to dump on the winning coach. And hockey players will be required to sport blood on their uniforms (but that requirement is easily fulfilled within the first couple of fightsplays).

And all uniforms must be covered in logos. All sporting participants must look like Indy 500 cars, apart from the speed, the endurance, and the sponsorship. And we’ll all wear tap shoes, because everyone loves a nice tap routine.

No comments: