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How to do something Gravel special? Well, it should be olive green, and it should have pockets. The design team at POC have clearly taken these two principles and, rather crazily, applied them to the Omne helmet, one of the many aero offerings in the brands helmet range.
Looking for a gravel-specific helmet when many of the best road bike helmets work just as well? POC thinks so. We’re not sure, but that won’t stop us from trying it to find out.
Gravel special helmet?
It looks like POC Omne is tempted to try some slightly unusual ideas for the product. The standard Omne is a very capable helmet, but we also have the solar-powered Omne Eternal, Omne Air Rapha Collaboration, Omne Lite, and here’s the Omne Ultra, which is loaded with adventure-ready features.
POC calls this helmet “embodying the spirit of gravel.” If the spirit of gravel is, as I suspect, tying things to other things more elegantly, then POC has the most support for this claim. The standard Omne chassis has been modified with a Velcro patch on one side so that riders can attach an easily visible ID patch on one side, and a small bungee cargo holder on the other. There’s also a back strap that runs vertically, with a strap, to fasten… other things? I believe this may be to protect the rain cover but it’s hard to tell from the pictures and it’s not highlighted anywhere.
The ultimate gravel-specific technology is Reco’s reflector, commonly found on top snow sports jackets, so if you’re caught in a badly timed snowstorm, mountain rescue can easily find your (hopefully still alive) jacket. Body. It’s hard to say whether this would be of any use in day-to-day applications, but it could be the difference between life and death for any of us trying to cross a glacier, as described in the Alps guidebook. Maybe less for your local club run.
A more useful feature of the Ricoh Reflector is the inclusion of MIPS for day-to-day use, like other helmets in the Omni range and most POC high-end helmets across the board.
Load gone too far?
I’m somewhat of a front-runner here. There are a lot of valid things that you want to wrap your head around. Unlike the best cargo bib shorts, but usually with plenty of room for gravel-oriented accessories, bananas, bananas, sweets and a tubeless patch kit, the cargo compartment on the Omni Ultra isn’t huge.
A flash can be a good use during a rescue, or maybe a dynamo headlight when you stop at the end of your 10,000km run is a torch bought from the local hardware store. You can wash down a banana and forget about it until you need a few calories, or a neatly folded emergency blanket if you’re caught in said swing on the way to a cafe stop. If you’re feeling safe, you can strap a spare helmet to your helmet so you don’t have to sacrifice your helmet protection if your original helmet gets lost in a crash. For this, perhaps the lightweight Omne Lite is the best choice.
Further testing will show that I can get real use for the gravel properties (no, I’m not taking it on a glacier!). If there is innovation and product development, it cannot come in any form, and products like this, low-hanging fruit for some simple mockups, lead to genuine questions about product specifications in the round. Do we need gravel-based stuff in general? Or, perhaps more pertinently, is the growing popularity of ultra races, especially for the amateur, going to give us ultra-special products?
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