Professional cycling is built on the rickety foundations of sponsorship, with each team keeping the lights on via the financial or material support of a dozen or more entities. Each of those comes with its own set of expectations – results, product development assistance, return on the marketing dollar, good old-fashioned sportswashing – and the teams’ role is to deliver on that as best they can. And if they don’t, or a sponsor’s fortune fades? The whole house of cards can come crashing down.
Against this precarious backdrop, then, it’s heartening to come across something you can rely on. One such mainstay is the Belgian team Soudal-QuickStep having a latex bedding sponsor on its books. The other Great Dependable Thing is that every year, there will be promo shots of the fellas having a pillow fight.
It all begins with a Belgian bedding company called Latexco, which has been a cycling sponsor since the mid-1990s – first with GB-MG, then Mapei, then Domo-Farmfrites and QuickStep. They were there during the Johan Museeuw years, during the Tom Boonen years, during the Remco Evenepoel years, and over that time their annual photoshoots became increasingly zany.
At first, it was just a cuddly snooze: tracing things back to the early 2010s, riders kinda snuggled up against each other, their heads resting on latex pillows on each other’s backs. But there’s only so many times that you can sleep on a colleague before things become formulaic, and by the middle of that decade one of the team’s photographers – Tim De Waele – had an idea to spice things up a little. Why not a pillow fight?
According to a Latexco PR director interviewed by Cycling Weekly: “We wanted to say that you could get a lot of energy sleeping on them – we didn’t just want people lying down. The idea of the pillow fight came up because of this. We repeat it every year, it’s always the last thing we do on the shoot, and the riders are always very happy and excited to do it. It’s tradition.”
With a decade-plus of pillow fights in the archive, there’s no shortage of photos to draw on, but concrete details of how these pillow fights are conducted – and how fierce they are – is harder to come by. For as long as I’ve been aware of their existence, though, I’ve had a kind of morbid fascination with them, imagining the hearty thwack of a latex pillow on a top cyclist’s torso.
In my imaginings, it’s a vitriolic free-for-all: a group of naturally competitive men at the peak of their physical powers inflicting soft violence on one another in the name of marketing. But for all that team QuickStep is very good at (cycling their bicycles; weathering the moods of Patrick Lefevere) there are some things that they are not (answering annoying emails about pillow fights).
Since mid 2020, my personal interest in the QuickStep pillow fights has been a professional one. I’ve repeatedly – and unsuccessfully – tried to extract information out of the team’s press officer about them. This has led me down other rewarding QuickAtep rabbit holes – the mystery of Remco Evenepoel’s unopened beer; which 4.1-star fast food joint the team took Mikel Landa to; earnest chats with Yves Lampaert about his tractors; what Patrick Lefevere thought of his two-Michelin-starred lunch during the 2023 E3 Saxo Classic. Each of those was satisfying in its own way, sure, but I had not gotten the one glimpse behind the curtain that I most craved. I wanted to know about the pillow fights. Preferably everything.
When Latexco merged with fellow Belgian latex bedding manufacturer Artilat in 2023, forming a new entity called Novaya (catchy!), it seemed that an era had come to an end for both a decades-long sponsorship and the wild photoshoots it produced. Into this void, however, stepped the Italian company Manifattura Falomo – a brand with some commercial link to Latexco, although neither brand’s website is forthcoming about the nature of that connection. All of that means that the pillow fight photoshoot was brought back from the brink.
In 2024, as the feature image above shows, they were back at it with Julian Alaphilippe preparing to go to town on Gianni Moscon while Warre Vangheluwe (I think?) reclined coquettishly alongside. In fact, so iconic is the QuickStep pillow fight that other teams have started getting in on the act, too: Intermarché-Wanty is the latest to get its riders to lay into each other with soft furnishings.
But a social media clip and an archive of photos only tells you so much about the lived reality of the experience – I needed a primary source. And as chance would have it, Kasper Asgreen – Tour of Flanders winner, very nice Danish man, and seven-year veteran of the team, A) is on his way to EF Education First next season, and B) was inclined to have a chat about pillow fights.
Lightly edited for clarity, here is the inside word.
Iain Treloar: Well first up, I appreciate you being willing to take a call about something silly.
Kasper Asgreen: Yeah, it’s a bit of a funny request! [laughs] But I was like, “Yeah, why not. That sounds pretty funny.”
IT: So in terms of the pillow fights – how many editions of those have you done in your time at QuickStep?
KA: I did it twice.
IT: OK – and how do they select who gets called up for the pillow fight?
KA: In our December training camp, the first three days of the camp – there’s no training plan. It’s just for getting all the photo shoots done. And then you get, like, a full schedule. Each rider gets their own schedule, but you need to show up all at these places, all in the hotel and in Calpe and then, yeah, it’s just on your schedule. It’s not like there’s a draw or whatever – it’s just one of the many photo shoots you have to go to. I guess it may be the sponsors that request some certain riders, in conjunction with communication staff in the team.
IT: Are there some sponsor activities that you are more excited about doing and some that you’re less excited about doing? I mean, officially I guess you have to love everything that you’re doing, but …
KA: I think in the end, it’s always like that, but it’s also a bit like personal preference. Like, if you should ask me and Julian [Alaphillipe] that same question, we will give very different answers. I love all the technical stuff of cycling, so for sure, the technical partners have more of my interest. I don’t know if you saw that launch video of our jersey last winter with the singing coming out of the back of the truck, with Julian and a couple of the other riders … if you asked me to do that, I would hate it but I’m sure he had a lot of fun. [laughs] I think it’s a bit of balance of personal preference. For me, it’s the technical partners – I find the technical aspects of cycling really interesting, so the technical partners, I always love to do that.
Luckily, we are 30 different riders, so there’s always somebody – and they also know us, and choose the riders that have something clever to say. I think if you try to get me to dance around like Julian can do, then it wouldn’t be such a great video. And if you try to get Julian to talk about some wheelset, it wouldn’t be the same answers as I would be able to give. We have our strengths, strengths and weaknesses.
IT: And would you say that pillow fighting is one of your strengths, Kasper?
KA: [Laughs] Yeah, that one I think falls a bit in the middle. At least the two times I’ve been there, everybody thinks it’s super fun. You get to beat each other up, so that’s pretty good. I don’t think anybody minds going to that one. [Laughs]
IT: I guess you’ve got kind of a height advantage, so you might be able to get a little bit more leverage downwards over some of the shorter riders …?
KA: Well … technically we need to be lying down, because they’re shooting us from above. But we always end up getting up. But then that’s kind of where the photoshoot ends, and then they need to reset, because we end up beating each other up out of the picture, which is not really useful. So, yeah, we need to kind of be lying down on the mattress, and then they’re shooting us from above.
IT: Ah, OK. Is it scripted, in terms of who’s lying where and how the layout is?
KA: That’s predetermined – the positions are predetermined.
IT: And the pillows … it’s a latex pillow, right?
KA: Correct – so it’s … it’s pretty heavy. It’s soft, but it’s a hefty thing. It weighs a couple of kilos. You can get some good swing on it.
IT: Does it hurt when it hits? Is there a ‘no faces’ rule, like, ‘stay away from the faces’?
KA: No, no. No rules, no. [Laughs]
IT: OK, so this is brutal. And you mentioned that everyone gets up by the end of it, and it’s just a free-for-all and everyone’s laying into each other …
KA: Yeah, and the pillows get destroyed because we are swinging so hard that the latex rips, of course – we end up with like little bits of latex pillow everywhere. That’s pretty good. The pillows and the mattresses – I think it’s a write-off afterwards. It goes in the trash.
IT: Is there anyone that you remember being a particularly fierce opponent, someone that was a really excellent …?
KA: [Immediately] Štybar.
IT: [Zdeněk] Štybar?!
KA: Yep. And Yves [Lampaert]. He did jujitsu fighting, so he … I don’t know how the fuck he manages to do it, but he manages to get the swings in that the rest of us can’t avoid.
IT: [Laughs] And is there anyone that sort of gets ganged up on? Does Remco – because he’s smaller – do people just kind of gang up on Remco?
KA: Nah, it’s more like – because we’re only three or four on the mattress at the time, it switches around a bit, but it’s only like three or four. So it’s not like you can really … well, you could, I guess you could gang up on one, but it’s just everybody against everybody.
IT: Final question: now that you’re moving to EF … I’ve just looked up all of their team partners and sponsors and things. There is no pillow sponsor. Is the pillow that you had at QuickStep coming with you?
KA: [Laughs] I’ve got a mattress at home from Latexco. And that, I think, will be staying. But I never got a pillow. We had a pillow and a mattress with us when we traveled around to the Grand Tours but those went back to the service course. And, yeah, it was not like “this is only Kasper’s” – it was shared across Grand Tours with different riders. So I think they’re gonna keep using those. So unfortunately, no pillow.
IT: Oh, sad times. Well, I hear that they fall apart as soon as you get in a pillow fight, so maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world. They need to work on their durability.
KA: [Laughs] I think when you have a bunch of overexcited guys starting to throw them around, it would take life out of most pillows. You get to beat each other up on the job and you get to get paid for it. You take the chance at both ends.
IT: That’s a pretty fun day, I would think.
KA: Yeah, that’s for sure. That’s for sure.
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