The story behind the gingham

It started, as most good AZB decisions do, after a ride. Someone had liberated a pink gingham tablecloth from a pile of bulk trash on Neubaugasse, and someone else draped it over their shoulders like a podium cape.

The joke lasted exactly one espresso before it stopped being a joke. By the following Sunday there were mockups. By the one after that, a vote — 14 to 1, and the one has since come around.

The 2026 kit is that tablecloth, more or less: garden-party pink, checked like a picnic, with the flowers turned up to eleven. It's the least serious-looking race kit in the Austrian amateur peloton, worn by people who take their Sundays very seriously indeed.