Bike Balls, flashing helmets and electric bikes coming to The Apprentice this week

As with Dragons' Den, one thing you can be sure of with sister BBC reality TV show The Apprentice, is that if you wait long enough, there will be an episode with a cycling theme – and this week, prospective business partners will be trying to impress Lord Sugar by creating and selling their own range of e-bikes, along with choosing accessories to complement them including Bike Balls and Lumos Cycle Helmets.

According to the show’s website, the candidates will learn about their task at Covent Garden’s London Transport Museum, with this week’s task culminating in them designing a prototype e-bike and pitching it to some of the country’s leading cycle retailers at a launch event.

On Wednesday's @bbcapprentice, Thomas gets the hump over his team's bicycle design. Can the office door stand it? #TheApprentice https://t.co/4Tfcyup3pd

— Lord Sugar (@Lord_Sugar) October 21, 2019

One half of each team will head to Nottingham – where Raleigh once had the world’s biggest bicycle factory – for the design and production element of the task, while the other half will remain in London to work on PR materials and the pitch, as well as choosing accessories.

On Wednesday's @bbcapprentice, Thomas gets the hump over his team's bicycle design. Can the office door stand it? #TheApprentice https://t.co/4Tfcyup3pd

— Lord Sugar (@Lord_Sugar) October 21, 2019

From this clip posted on Lord Sugar’s Twitter account, we know that the latter will include Bike Balls, the scrotum-shaped rear light from Canada launched in 2015, and the Lumos cycle helmet, which incorporates front and rear lights as well as indicators (the latter feature being a hardy perennial on  Dragons’ Den, by the way).

> Dragons' Den backs indicators: another dodgy decision from the dragons on a cycling product

The show airs on BBC One at 9pm on Wednesday evening and afterwards will be available on BBC iPlayer for 30 days.

We’ve seen cycling featured on The Apprentice before.

In 2016, the teams in that year’s edition were tasked with bringing cycling-related products to market.

> The Apprentice took on cycling last night - how did it go?

The two teams respectively chose the Lumo Holloway gilet and Aftershoks bone conduction headphones – both products we’d previously featured on road.cc.

Curiously, the venues selected by the show’s producers for the teams to do their PR stunts in support of the products weren’t, for example, cycling cafés or busy cycle routes.

Instead, Waterloo and King’s Cross railway stations were chosen – with one attempting to get its point across by using mime artistes to simulate a ‘crash’ between a motorist and cyclist.