Will the peloton soon have cycling shorts with an airbag?

The growing concern about how to improve the safety of cyclists has led many to sharpen their ingenuity to try to improve it. One of them is Sam Ratajczak, former R&D chief of Bioracer and founder of SID Sport Innovation Design, a brand under which he is developing cycling shorts with an integrated airbag that promises to be a game-changer in terms of protection in case of a fall.

Cycling takes inspiration from motorcycles to create cycling shorts with an airbag

In these eventful days, with Wout van Aert's serious fall still fresh in our minds and the controversy over the modification of the finish at the Arenberg sector in the Paris-Roubaix that will take place next Sunday to avoid falls, cyclist safety is once again a hot topic.

Among the proposals, not only to reduce the risk of falling but as a protective measure for when it does happen, we were struck by the publication made by Sam Rtajczak, former R&D chief of Bioracer, on his LinkedIn account where he shows his prototype of cycling shorts with an airbag, a system that could represent a tremendous improvement in reducing the consequences of falls.

The use of garments with airbags is not new. In the world of motorcycles, they are already common in high-end jackets and competition clothing, having contributed to improving the safety of motorcyclists. In cycling, however, there is the condition that the garment must maintain its functionality so as not to hinder either comfort or performance when pedaling. Additionally, in cycling, impacts, in order to decide when the system should be activated, are much more difficult to detect accurately, something that users of cycling computers with fall detection function surely know well, as it is not uncommon for them to receive false positives that trigger the alarm.

This is the focus of the development project of cycling shorts with an airbag from SID Sport Innovation Design, in whose prototype we can see how it has airbags in the hip area, which usually receives the impact first in most falls, as well as following the contour of the straps, which also ensures protection on the chest and back without modifying the conventional structure of cycling shorts.

Evidently, what can be seen is still a prototype that will need further development to solve the problems we mentioned earlier, as well as others such as how to inflate it, which in motorcycle jackets is done using a CO2 canister like those used to repair punctures.

In any case, this is not the first proposal for cycling clothing designed to minimize the consequences of a fall. We cannot forget that the Spanish brand Etxeondo offers the Orhi shorts with side panels made of anti-abrasive Dyneema fabric that add extra protection not only against impact itself, which for now is inevitable, but also against those common falls where we slide and end up with abrasions that, in the case of road cyclists, practically skin the area.

It is also worth mentioning the airbag helmet for urban use marketed by the Swedish company Hövding, which had to be withdrawn from the market after several viral videos showed it inflating for no apparent reason, leading to the company's bankruptcy.

Where nothing has yet been devised is in developing protection against the most common cyclist injury, a broken collarbone, an area of the body in which designers of these systems face the same problems we mentioned for cycling shorts and, like fall detection, present tremendous complexity due to the full range of movements that cyclists make.