It’s been almost two weeks now since Uno-X Mobility made a public celebration of Pride Month, and I’ve thought of little else since then.
It was around lunchtime on Sunday, June 14, and I was settling into an afternoon of work after walking the dog, making some lunch, and brewing my second coffee of the day. Social media is often a good place to start during race season, seeking information, insights and ‘sensations’ from teams and riders before the day’s events. Among the pre-race presentation snaps, banal quotes describing breakaway hopes, and complaints about the weather that Sunday was a short edited Instagram story from Uno-X that showed three groups of riders from both the men’s and women’s WorldTour squads, all of them cheerily (mostly) displaying the rainbow pride flag.
I tapped through the next couple of clips before realising what I’d seen. Scrolling back, I watched it again, noting the number of riders involved, and where the gestures were made – the women’s team had raced the Copenhagen Sprint on Saturday, and the men were represented both in Copenhagen and at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes on Sunday. Sure, some of them looked a little less enthusiastic about their flag waving, but I – perhaps generously – accepted that it may simply have been the intensity of pre-race (even home race) nerves that I was seeing, rather than any actual reluctance. And there wasn’t a single team member who was empty-handed. That was something.
Did we do a good job with this story?
