I prefer to be as unencumbered as possible in my active pursuits. I’d rather flirt with hypothermia than wear an extra ounce of clothing in the winter. I will not have extra food for you if we ride long. I don’t even like to wear helmets.
I do wear them, for the most part. But I learned to ride in the 1970s and started racing in the ’80s. I lived enough of the wind-in-your-hair era to truly miss it. Even now, when my wife isn’t watching, I’ll leave my helmet behind for shopping trips on my townie. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I avoided gloves for most of my years as a cyclist.
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There were situations for which I needed them: winters in the Rocky Mountains, several muggy years in Japan, most mountain bike rides. Otherwise, I rode barehanded. Good bars and thick tape were enough for me. But for the past seven years, since the first time I wore a pair of Giro’s pro-style Zero CS gloves, I can’t remember the last time I rode gloveless.
There’s nothing particularly special about the Zeros. That’s exactly why I like them: They don’t have any excess material to foul up the connection between my hands and the bars. What they do have is a very thin, perforated, synthetic-leather palm that can hold up to thousands of miles and several trips through the washing machine. The sensation is almost as good as riding barehanded, and I get improved grip and a microfiber patch for wiping away sweat and wayward snot rockets.
The more important thing the Zeros provide is an annual ritual. Some people mark the start of serious cycling season with Milan-San Remo or a training camp in Tucson. I do it with a new pair of gloves. I wait for the weather to turn and for my winter training to start showing up in my power data. Then, I buy a pair of Zeros. That’s my marker.
In the world of cycling, where everything can be polarizing—socks outside of leg warmers, glasses under helmet straps, the old AG2R kit (which was objectively awful, BTW)—gloves get a big shrug. Even the Velominati, cycling’s self-appointed style enforcers, who have a rule for everything (most of which should be enthusiastically ignored), say gloves are optional.
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Historically, when the choice of bar covering was leather or none, gloves no doubt provided a welcome extra layer. Still, there’s not an era for which you can’t find images of both gloved and gloveless riders. Major Taylor? No gloves. Fausto Coppi? Usually gloves. Tom Boonen? Blasting across the French cobbles with nothing between him and his brake hoods.
It is absolutely a choice—one that cyclists, shockingly, seem happy to let you make on your own. If you feel like you need gloves, fine. If you want to leave your paws naked to the world, hey, you do you. I posted a question on Twitter asking cyclists about their glove habits. (Don’t do this unless you want to have strangers talk to you about “degloving.” Also, please don’t do an image search for “degloving.”)
I, barely more than a cycling nobody, received more than 80 replies. At every level, from weekend club rider to pro, there are plenty of cyclists who ride gloveless (almost always for comfort or “feel”), plenty who won’t ride without gloves (almost always for grip or crash protection), and those who are 100 percent kinda sorta maybe sometimes.
Denver magazine editor Geoff Van Dyke eschews gloves for anything except descending, “just in case I hit the pavement,” while David Thompson, a cyclist from Nanaimo, British Columbia, wears gloves only for climbing. “I find the extra grip that gloves offer to be useful,” he wrote. “Usually pull them off for the descent.”
Even if you change your mind on where you stand, you’ll be in good company. American road and track star Chloé Dygert Owen avoided gloves until a crash made her reconsider. “I am definitely not a fan of wearing gloves,” says Owen, who won the junior road race at the 2015 World Championships sans gloves and continued the look after she turned pro the following year.
That changed after a massive spill at the 2018 Tour of California. “That was my first race wearing them. [Judging by] the damage, I can’t imagine what would’ve happened if I hadn’t had them. Since then I’ve worn gloves at every single road race.”
My reasons for wearing gloves are less pragmatic. At first glance, they don’t change much for me—a bit less feel here, a bit more grip there, new tan lines. But the ritual act of buying them is important to me.
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I wear gloves because, for some weird reason, that’s now how I tell myself that I’m in the thick of my cycling season. I used to have a race calendar and coaching plans for that. Now I have a desk job and preschool drop-offs. So buying those gloves is my new way of establishing an annual rhythm. The first time I slip them on, I know it’s time to ride hard. And while buying new gloves each season may be my own personal ritual, when I look at the number of responses I got to my query, it seems that the act of putting on gloves at the start of each ride signals a shift for others as well.
Yes, it seems silly. Here’s the thing about rituals, though: They work. If you think performing a certain act will settle your nerves or help you focus, it probably will. As the study of rituals has moved out of anthropology and into psychology and neuroscience, we’ve come to understand that they affect performance in measurable ways.
This is true for superstitions, as well. In broad terms, you control a ritual, while a superstition is belief in something that controls you. For example, if someone gives you a golf ball and tells you it’s lucky, you’ll be more likely to sink a putt. Seriously. That comes from a study in Psychological Science from researchers at the University of Cologne.
Likewise, if you have a superstition or ritual—a lucky pair of socks, a certain number of dribbles before a free throw—and you are denied it, your performance will tank. Again, that’s from a published study in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology.
The authors offer a few theories for why rituals work, including that they help athletes tune out distractions and focus on the task at hand, and that “routines create psychological and physiological readiness.” That leads to measurably better performances, even if, intellectually, you know it’s all BS. It’s kind of like how you can make your body believe you’ve got more calories to burn simply by swishing a carbohydrate drink in your mouth and then spitting it out. Your brain is stupid like that.
Is this all way too much to think about for something as minor as gloves? If we’re talking just about gloves, then yes. They are so unimportant, in the grand scheme, that even the hyper-judgmental world of cycling doesn’t have a rule about them. But as an example of something that can help you perform at an objectively higher level by making you feel subjectively better, they’re pretty freaking great.
And, really, aside from behavior that endangers others, there isn’t a wrong way to ride a bike (except in the old AG2R kit).
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Category: HOW
