Olympic champion cyclist and Team Sky star Geraint Thomas has been recruited, along with other GB riders, to front a campaign called ‘Let’s clear the air’ that is to be launched jointly by British Cycling and car maker Fiat, its official vehicle supplier.
According to the trade website BikeBiz, the campaign aims to "to improve relations between cyclists and motorists on the road." It is timed to run alongside the relaunch of the Fiat Punto. One model in the new range, the GBT (pictured) comes with a year’s membership of British Cycling thrown in.
Thomas, who is alternating between the road and the track in the build-up to the London Olympics, where he aims to retain the team pursuit gold medal he helped Great Britain win at Beijing four years ago, spoke about his involvement in the initiative in a column for the newspaper Metro last week.
“Off the bike I’ve been working on a campaign with Fiat trying to improve relations between cyclists and motorists on the road – to prove we’re not guys in Lycra who don’t pay taxes,” he said – although BikeBiz points out that Fiat too was until recently of incorporating the incorrect term ‘road tax’ in its print adverts.
Thomas added: “Most cyclists own cars too, so we all need to try and get along!” In fact, market research has shown that regular cyclists are more likely than average to have more than one car in their household, while according to the Department for Transport’s National Travel Survey, 83 per cent of cyclists own a car, compared to 82 per cent of non-cyclists.
Fiat’s UK website has a page dedicated to its backing of the governing body, where it says it is “lining up some exclusive offers for British Cycling members.” As yet, there’s no details of what those might be, although members are encouraged to sign up for updates.
In the past, Fiat was the official vehicle supplier to both the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia – which last year began in the Italian marque’s home city of Turin – a role now undertaken by Volkswagen-owned Skoda.
News of Fiat and British Cycling’s joint campaign comes in the same week as the US arm of German car manufacturer Volkswagen unveiled a partnership with national cycling advocacy group, Bikes Belong.
Correlation causation yada yada. The real significant factor is that they were cyclists of course
Presumably in many, many crime cases the victim uses "bad language" after becoming the victim of the crime, so if that was a valid criteria, then...
Only charge is likely to revolve around not wearing a seatbelt, won't be anything to do with protecting cyclists......
I've found BIN listings for full bikes or high value items tend to struggle on ebay; they seem to attract a ton of watchers, but few bidders. I...
I think Canon University is what they call a "diploma mill"
Campagnolo have a cassette, and several groupsets, for you, all of which work on the same freehubs as their 11sp ... just saying
Won't make much difference to you, unless you just want to treat yourself- would be much more effective getting fitter at the kind of speed you...
Does it matter on the "who?" when he has potentially 700k following on Tiktok. Probably more people have seen this attempt at "humour" then saw the...
Some of us ride for more than an hour though! And in some varying terrains that you simply have to walk on/over/through at points. With the ever...
I agree, last year's scott addict rc20 was around 4k with Force AXS, this looks like it will give an opportunity for manufacturers to push up the...