This article was produced in association with KASK
“I’ve spent most of my energy continuously innovating and working; I’ve never had much time to think about what I’ve achieved. Maybe we haven’t even properly enjoyed the milestones that we’ve accomplished over the years, which is a bit of a shame. It all happened so quickly. We’re a company that doesn’t mess around with words.”
When Rouleur interviewed KASK founder Angelo Gotti last year, this was his admission. The milestones with the Italian helmet brand he set up in 2004 “maybe” hadn’t been suitably celebrated. These include no fewer than seven Tour de France, three Giro d’Italia and two Vuelta a España victories. Add to that, four gold medals from Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 and multiple World Time Trial Championships on the road. Most recently, the Australian team pursuit squad and the Italian women’s Madison pair wore KASK helmets to Olympic gold in Paris.
It is KASK’s 20th anniversary year in 2024, so it’s a good time to look back at those milestones. It all started in 2004 in a small workshop in Chiuduno, just east of Gotti’s native Bergamo, but Gotti himself was by no means a beginner at helmet design. He started work aged 16 with a producer of safety helmets of different types, learning every aspect of the business, from working in the warehouse to eventually heading up the technical office. “I worked as a consultant in the development and design of helmets, mostly focusing on moulds and prototype development,” he said. “My job involved overseeing every stage of the product’s design and development, including certification, which is very important in the helmet world. Nowadays, in cycling, we often talk about aerodynamics and technical performance, but we mustn’t forget that helmets are first and foremost a safety product.”
After two years of consulting from 2002 to 2004, he set up KASK, which initially supplied third-party product assembly to clients with whom Gotti had previously worked. Initially there were no KASK products or branding, but after the UCI made helmets mandatory in professional racing following the death of Andrei Kivilev in 2003, very quickly they also became an essential part of the amateur rider’s equipment and Gotti was ready to meet the increased demand.
Although he never sought sponsorship with professional teams to increase sales, Gotti says he recognised very early the benefits of working with athletes to improve his helmets’ performance. So in 2006 his brand, now officially called KASK, partnered with Barloworld, a South African ProConti team registered in Italy with directeurs sportifs Claudio Corti and Valerio Tebaldi who, like Gotti, were Bergamaschi. In 2007, Barloworld got a wildcard entry to the Tour de France and won two stages with Mauricio Soler and Robbie Hunter, with the Colombian climbing prodigy Soler taking the King of the Mountains competition. It was Soler’s debut Tour de France and KASK’s too, and the special polka-dot edition of the flagship KS-10 helmet that he wore was the perfect way to announce the arrival of a talented young professional and an ambitious young helmet brand that arrived on the scene as technologically advanced as any. The cycling world sat up and took notice.
In 2008, Barloworld received another wildcard entry to the Tour de France, this time with a 22-year-old Kenyan rider born to British parents, called Chris Froome, in the squad. Finishing 84th overall and 11th in the young rider competition, Froome wasn’t a Soler or a Hunter...yet. But Gotti worked closely with 81 Although he never sought sponsorship with professional teams to increase sales, Gotti says he recognised very early him and other up-and-coming pros living near Bergamo on a new type of time trial helmet he was developing. And when in 2009 Team Sky came looking for a helmet sponsor ready for its launch the following year, Froome gave Dave Brailsford Gotti’s phone number.
Brailsford came to Bergamo to meet Gotti. Then Carsten Jeppesen, Team Sky’s head of technical operations, arrived. Ten days later, testing with the riders at Manchester velodrome started. Gotti told Rouleur: “They were looking for a technological partner to develop products based on their studies and years of research data [Brailsford had been performance director of British Cycling since 2003]. On our part, we were looking for a team to conduct serious research, not just visibility. It was the perfect partnership.”
And on Brailsford: “I mainly remember the feeling of being in the company of someone who was used to achieving goals.” Team Sky famously leapt out of the blocks, scoring a one-two in their first ever race, the Cancer Council Classic criterium in Adelaide, Greg Henderson and Chris Sutton crossing the line arms aloft, wearing the new KASK Vertigo. But back to that time trial helmet that Gotti had started developing before Brailsford called.
On May 8 2010, Bradley Wiggins won the 8.4-kilometre Giro d’Italia prologue in Amsterdam, giving Team Sky its first Grand Tour stage victory and leader’s jersey. His performance around the tight, city-centre circuit was improved – marginally but measurably, in the Team Sky method – by the new KASK Bambino he wore. With its short tail and integrated visor, the helmet looked nothing like the TT helmets of the previous decade, which had grown progressively longer.
“It was all based on the specific needs, cycling position and the physical shape of Bradley Wiggins,” said Gotti. “The team’s approach, the philosophy of marginal gains, allowed us to question everything, even things that the industry took as certainties.”
It seemed obvious: a long tail works optimally only as long as the rider keeps his head in one position. After that it becomes an air brake. The Bambino allowed Wiggins to duck and dive around the corners, tuck his head in along the straights, saving watts in a much wider range of head positions and angles. After Wiggins won the British national time trial title for the second year running in September 2010, KASK made him a British champion’s version of the Bambino, featuring his signature roundel. Less than two years later he was wearing a yellow Bambino when he won the stage 19 time trial to clinch the first ever Tour de France won by a British rider.
There was another celebration for the KASK Bambino in 2012: Former F1 driver turned handcyclist Alex Zanardi won gold at the Paralympics in the H4 road race and H4 time trial at Brands Hatch, 11 years after losing his legs in a horrific crash.
Meanwhile, the KASK Protone was coming. Spotted on select Team Sky riders before the 2014 Tour de France, its striking design perfectly balanced ventilation and aerodynamics – not to mention aesthetics. Designed using computational fluid dynamics and validated in the wind tunnel, the eight large vents at the front tapered into a more shrouded rear, allowing the air to flow cleanly over it. Froome gave the Protone its first Tour win in 2015 and that same year Geraint Thomas proved its safety credentials via a terrifying-looking head-on crash into a telegraph pole while descending the Col de Manse on stage 16.
The Welshman simply picked himself up, got onto a new bike and lost just 40 seconds. In another freak accident that didn’t call on the Protone’s protection system but had potentially serious consequences for the yellow jersey, in 2016 Froome abandoned his bike and started running up Mont Ventoux after crashing into a motorcycle which had been stalled in chaotic crowds, with Richie Porte and Bauke Mollema, a kilometre from the finish. Rather than wait for the team car, which was several minutes back, the British rider decided to make his way towards the line on foot. It was one of the craziest days ever on the Tour de France.
For 2017 KASK debuted a new helmet developed with Team Sky that would give riders more ventilation than the Protone for the mountain stages – assuming they would be tackling them on bikes rather than on foot – and fewer grammes. The Valegro had 36 vents, but had still been aerodynamically optimised in the wind tunnel and was very similar in silhouette to the Protone. As well as winning the Tour de France that year, Froome also won the Vuelta – with the Valegro ideally suited to the inferno-like conditions of southern Spain in September. With the by-now established winning combination of the KASK Protone for the flat stages, Valegro for the mountains and Bambino for the time trials, it was Geraint Thomas’s turn to give the helmet brand its sixth Tour de France victory in 2018. He was wearing a special yellow Protone when he crossed the line on the Champs-Elysées wrapped in the Welsh flag. It was an unforgettable image and a Tour for the ages.
With Egan Bernal winning the Tour in 2019 for Team Ineos, and KASK again supplying the iconic three helmets, in 2020 the brand unveiled a new version of the iconic Bambino, the Bambino Pro Evo, and an awe-inspiring new time trialling talent who would dominate the discipline – Filippo Ganna – was perfectly placed to model it. Since Bradley Wiggins won that first Grand Tour stage for Sky in 2010, time-trial bikes, positions, clothing and equipment had evolved and improved and speeds had increased. Ganna was going faster than anyone before him, as he proved when he broke the Hour Record in 2022.
KASK went back to the wind tunnel and remodelled the Bambino so that it still offered optimal aerodynamics in all head positions, but the slightly longer tail perfectly filled the gap from the back of Ganna’s head to his shoulders. His win in the World Time Trial Championship at Imola in 2020 was a masterclass in aerodynamics and power. And there were many more wins to come: the following year Ganna led the Italian team pursuit quartet to the gold medal in the delayed Tokyo Olympics. And in 2022 came what is arguably the Bambino Pro Evo’s crowning achievement to date: the Hour Record, in which Ganna not only beat the previous mark, set by his Ineos stablemate Dan Bigham wearing a KASK Mistral, by more than a kilometre, but he became the first rider to surpass Chris Boardman’s 1996 ‘Superman’ distance of 56.375 kilometres.
Meanwhile, in road racing, Ineos Grenadiers riders were using the new KASK Utopia, the brand’s most aerodynamic road helmet so far, proven in the wind tunnel, and also proven by Dylan van Baarle’s win at Paris-Roubaix in 2022. The Dutchman covered the 262.81km between Compiègne and Roubaix in 5 hours, 52 minutes and 21 seconds at an average speed of 44.8kph – the fastest ever at the race.
In 2024 KASK boosted their aerodynamic helmet range with the introduction of the Nirvana. The ultra-aero road helmet was launched with the Ineos Grenadiers, offering game-changing aerodynamics and superior ventilation. The Nirvana joins the flagship Elemento at the top of KASK’s range. Also developed with the Ineos Grenadiers, the Elemento was launched in 2023 and was ridden to Olympic gold in Paris in cross-country mountain biking by Pauline Ferrand-Prévot and to the world title in the same discipline in its debut year. It introduced Fluid Carbon 12 and Multipod, both pioneering technologies. Fluid Carbon 12’s composite technopolymer absorbs more energy from an impact than traditional materials and distributes the force generated more evenly across the entire helmet, allowing the size of the internal channels to be increased to improve ventilation, while simultaneously reducing the size of the ventilation holes for improved aerodynamics. Multipod is KASK’s proprietary 3D-printed internal padding. It functions isotropically, meaning it withstands energy from impacts the same, regardless of the direction in which the force is applied.
It’s clear that 20 years on, KASK is still at the head of the race thanks to increasingly sophisticated R&D and manufacturing techniques, as well as the continuing close partnership with Ineos Grenadiers. Angelo Gotti has no plans to be anywhere else. Now KASK has 170 employees working across three subsidiaries and sold more than a million helmets in 2023 in 80-plus countries. According to Gotti, attention to detail is just one element that has helped KASK achieve its incredible growth, coupled with rigorous quality control at every stage of production and the passion for developing quality products that he has always instilled in his colleagues.
There are ups and downs in professional cycling – and collisions with telegraph poles – but Gotti has kept a cool head ever since that first success with Barloworld and the early days in the small Bergamo workshop. So have the riders wearing his helmets; what’s more they’ve done so at speed, safely and comfortably. There have been 20 years of successes by riders wearing KASK helmets, but the company is only looking forward to many more.
