If you have a small head, they could be used as a neck gaitor!

Fat Cyclist says knee warmers are stupid, but they are probably not any stupider than any other random piece of transitional outerwear. Among the reasons he includes... ah forget it, you can read it yourself.

Anyway, our own Jerry Case, in his lightly demeaning manner, weighed in on the subject:

Fatty,

You are wearing your knee warmers wrong. They don't just start where your shorts stop. They extend up over your thighs, thus providing TWO layers over your quads, which I find just as useful as keeping my knees warm. Good knee warmers extend most of the way down the calf too-- at least better, longer cut ones--the woolies from Swobo or Spot. So you've got much of your calf muscle covered, while your shinbones--like the legs of birds in winter -- don't really need any coverage at all.

So why not wear legwarmers? Cuz legwarmers + overboots make you look like a gay pixie, whereas kneewarmers + overboots looks superbad.

This is objectively true and provable.

Next, we suppose Fatty will dismiss long underwear, sweater vests, western-style shirts, and petticoats. Gawd, if he'd only level his barrel at some article of clothing that really deserves it, like epaullettes, spats or lederhosen.

That post-cyclysm glow

Interesting article here on the business end of professional cycling... the relationship between television coverage, team sponsors, and marketing promotion. Here we thought teevee coverage sucked these days because OLN shot their wad on the "Lance Chronicles," and then changed their name to the überstoopid "Versus Network."

IFM, a sports research company based in Germany that measures sponsorship impact, calculates that cycling has plunged as a marketing investment since the start of the 2007 season in March. The early season included four pro tour events: Paris-Nice, the Tirreno-Adriatico and Milano-San Remo races in Italy and the Ronde van Vlaanderen in Belgium.

According to IFM, the three races suffered a drop in total live audiences with the 91-year-old Belgian tour faring the worst with a 77 percent decline from a year earlier.

That drop depressed the worth of cycling sponsorships, which are valued at about 10 percent of the cost of buying traditional advertising time in the same time slots, according to Jens Seeberger, spokesman for IFM.

Tracking six key television markets in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Britain, IFM found that television coverage of cycling events started to drop off after the Landis affair from almost eight and a half hours to five and a half hours. With the start of the 2007 season, Spain and Italy dropped live coverage.

Aside from the astonishing news that the US is considered a key TV market for cycling, and aside from the nifty business revelations here (10 percent of the cost to advertise to support a whole damn professional cycling team?! That's a no brainer.... um, I think), the point seems to be that people are not tuning into bike races on the teevee as much as they used to just a year ago. Is that connected to doping scandals? Or is it connected to the launch of Pinch Flat News?

Note to Corporate moguls like you, decay: Advertising here at Pinch Flat costs $1 million. But you can buy our kits for just $10K!