Van Rysel has developed a skinsuit with an integrated airbag system to protect its sponsored pro riders in the event of a fall. It points out that around 20% of the WorldTour peloton sustain a fracture each season, a total of more than 1,300 in the last six years, and that injury rates are climbing.
According to Jocelyn Bar, product manager at Van Rysel: “Behind every race number, there’s a human being and sadly it is still widely accepted that a rider can lose everything in a fraction of a second due to a crash.
“At Van Rysel, this is a fact we no longer want to accept. What helmets represented 20 years ago, we think Airbag can represent today, but now, we’re looking beyond the head, we need to protect as much of the body as we can.”
Van Rysel says that it has designed the integrated airbag skinsuit specifically for use by parent company Decathlon’s sponsored Decathlon CMA CGM WorldTour pro team and its own Van Rysel Roubaix UCI Continental team. It says the skinsuit is being tested and validated by the pros, with a view to its potential use in races, although it has not yet been deployed.
Dominique Serieys, general manager and CEO of Decathlon CMA CGM, points out the additional safety on offer in the event of a crash can contribute to lower mental load for riders and performance gains.
The Picnic-PostNL team has been assessing a similar system since the start of this year and the UCI has begun consultations on airbag implementation as part of its ongoing efforts to reduce injury rates and severity in cycle racing.
Van Rysel has worked with aerodynamics experts at Swiss Side and French airbag specialist In&motion to engineer the airbag system to weigh around 500g, which it says is around half the weight of similar systems that are mandatory for MotoGP races. It contributes to a total skinsuit weight of around 700g, with abrasion-resistant fabric used in typical crash impact areas of the skinsuit.
It claims the airbag’s sensors analyse rider dynamics 1,000 times per second and the airbag will deploy in 60 milliseconds in the event of a crash. It’s designed to protect primarily the thorax and rib cage, the neck and the full length of the spine.
Of course, it’s important that the airbag doesn’t deploy when not needed, so Van Rysel says its crash-detection algorithm has been trained on more than 450 million kilometres of data for cycling, MotoGP and ski racing.
Van Rysel also claims its airbag skinsuit doesn’t impede aerodynamics or thermoregulation, as tested in the wind tunnel and its climate chamber. It plans to offer the airbag skinsuit to its customers within the next two years.
