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

This week the candidates need to create an e-bike range to pitch at leading retailers and impress Lord Sugar

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.

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.

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.

Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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5 comments

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handlebarcam | 4 years ago
2 likes

You know you're getting old when, instead of wanting to punch the pricks on The Apprentice in the face, for being precisely the sort of greedy, moronic wankers who're fucking up the world, your first reaction is to offer them some jelly.

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ktache | 4 years ago
0 likes

Alan Sugar you say, I can therefore post a link to this response to some nonsense he spurted forth-

https://waronthemotorist.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/cyclists-need-more-sit...

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CygnusX1 | 4 years ago
3 likes

I shall be avoiding The Apprentice even more than usual this week then.

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ex_terra | 4 years ago
1 like

It must be a laugh a minute for Sir Alan given that he knows more than a thing or two about bikes and has a penchant for Pinarellos.

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burtthebike | 4 years ago
0 likes

Well, Thomas is right about the bike, unlikely to sell to their target market.  Perhaps if they looked at what the older cyclist buys, they might have the faintest clue https://www.bristolbicycles.co.uk/product-category/bikes/

On the other hand, that design was so totally wrong perhaps it was faked for the cameras.

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