The Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes was one big learning curve for Paul Seixas, but if he had one lesson to share in the aftermath of his bandaged exit it was this: “Always wear your gloves”.
The 19-year-old French super-talent crashed at speed on a descent on the penultimate day of racing, and while he bounced back up to plug an enormous gap before limiting his losses on the summit finish, he was out of the race very soon into the final stage.
Seixas said he could barely grip the handlebars and while all four limbs were covered in bandages by Saturday night, it was his hands, he revealed, that took the brunt of the fall.
“I slid like a toboggan, on my front,” Seixas said. “I grated myself on the road – I was sliding for 20 or 30 metres I think. On a dry road that does you no good.
“When you slide on your hands at 70km/h, your hands pay a heavy price.”
It’s not that Seixas was not wearing gloves; he was wearing a pair of black fingerless mitts. But he felt the damage would have been much worse otherwise.
“What saved me today was maybe the gloves, because the gloves were torn up.
“I was wearing gloves but even so my hands were battered. Without gloves I wouldn’t have been able to get going again, I don’t think.
“Always wear your gloves when you ride,” he repeated in separate interviews.
The pros and cons of wearing gloves
Road cycling gloves have been in decline for some time, with many high profile pros eschewing them except on key occasions like Paris-Roubaix, though even Mathieu van der Poel goes without them for the cobbles.
They indeed will, thanks to real, or in recent times synthetic, leather or suede palms, help with abrasion in the event of a fall. But generally speaking cycling gloves are not designed with this in mind.
Outside of a crash, their primary function is to provide additional comfort to the hands on the bars, adding padding to the hypothenar (the inside of the heel of the palm, as you look down at your own hands), under which the ulnar nerve passes. Impingement of this nerve can cause numbness or tingling in the little, ring, and index fingers.
Why are pros ditching them in increasing numbers, then?
Well, bars are more ergonomic than they used to be and so with a decent bike fit, they rarely need extra padding.
Weight and aerodynamics may be a factor, too, though a pair of the best cycling gloves hardly tip the scales by much.
From personal experience it’s likely cooling and comfort at play; the back of the hands and the inside of the wrists feature blood vessels very close to the surface of the skin, and covering these up can give you an unpleasant, clammy feeling.
Exposing the skin to the air – especially a body part that’s very much in the wind – can aid in keeping body temperatures down, and this is likely the risk-reward dilemma at play.
Who wears gloves?
Gloves for the Spring Classics, seems to be Pogačar’s approach. Curiously he celebrated his third Flanders this year glove-less but he did have them on for most of the race. He occasionally wears gloves at the Tour de France and other stage races but is mostly bare-handed.
No gloves, never, not even at Roubaix.
The Belgian will somewhat bizarrely slip his gloves on for a podium ceremony, but in the race itself, he’s always bare-handed.
The leading rider in the women’s peloton is firmly in the gloves camp – she wears them for every race.
The women’s peloton would appear to be a far more glove-friendly environment, and while Niewiadoma does often wear mitts, she’s one of the few big names who regularly goes without.
The former world champion is another who will sometimes take the gloves off, though less regularly, and we can’t see much of a pattern.
