Special Edition Filippo Pozzato Italian Champion Jersey and Bibshorts

When these special edition, black Filippo 'Pippo' Pozzato Italian champion jerseys arrived at Prendas in December 2009 all chaos broke out!

Santini produced a one-off skinsuit for Sgnr Pozzato for a charity cycle-cross race "Move to Improve" that was organised by Tom Boonen and Wilfried Peeters in Mol, Belgium.

Of course, Belgium is the spiritual home for cyclo-cross in Europe, but this event held in Boonen's home town featured a number of top road riders on a sandy course to raise thousands of Euros at the race and also a charity dinner the day before - with no doubt the odd Duval consumed!

You have to remember that this was 2009! Although Twitter and Facebook were about, the levels of information were nowhere near as good as cyclingnews.com was - which meant we visited the site 3-4 times every day for the latest news.

So when the photo appeared, it took all of about 60 seconds before an email was fired off to Santini asking permission for us to commission a limited run of black Pozzato Italian champion jersey and bib shorts. After a bit of email ping-pong, an order was on the system and would be in production at the end of November!

As luck would have it, the first delivery to this highly anticipated Pozzato Italian champion jersey and bib shorts arrived on the 14th December 2009 which meant we had many happy customers getting their kit in time for Christmas!

Times have changed now, the Prendas custom-made dispatch system is now highly developed and easily copes with hundreds of orders per day, but back then it was a pretty manually intensive exercise getting 100+ orders out in a day.

Unfortunately, demand was such that we ran out within 3 days and then had to re-order twice, on the third delivery the matching long sleeve jersey and track mitts/summer gloves also arriving in June the following year.

katusha-pozzatto-black-special-edition-santini-long-sleeve-jersey-with-cycling-gloves-mitts

Pippo then later wore the kit in the 2010 Paris Roubaix as a tribute to the late Franco Ballerini, not sure he saw the kit on our website, maybe he did! If you were not aware of how the "standard" white Italian Champion kit looked like, here's a photo I took at the 2009 Tour of Britain with him looking suitably Italian on the start line before the off!



Whilst researching this blog article, I was delighted to find this photo of me with two Dan's
(and Irish Champion Nicholas Roche) that we are still in touch with and we are happy to consider friends. Step forward Dan Fleeman and Daniel Lloyd.