The team and the Swedish eyewear and helmet manufacturer will continue to work in close cooperation as our partnership reaches into its second decade.

Since 2014, EF Pro Cycling has collaborated with POC’s designers and engineers to create lighter, better ventilated, and faster racing equipment. Never afraid to turn heads and never content to settle for the status quo, we have gone to the drawing board time and time again to develop helmets and glasses that better protect athletes and help them perform at the cutting edge of the sport.

“EF Pro Cycling is excited to build on our decade-long collaboration with POC and work together for four more years,” says EF Pro Cycling founder and CEO Jonathan Vaughters. “Our partnership with POC is one of the longest standing and most successful collaborations in pro cycling. We have long been impressed by POC’s openness to ideas, as we continue to push the envelope of high-performance racing and work to improve athlete safety. Our staff have spent countless hours with their team, testing eyewear and helmets in the wind-tunnel and the lab. Unbound by any paradigm of how racing helmets and eyewear should look, we will continue to develop better cycling equipment together to make athletes safer and more competitive on the road.”

Our collaboration means just as much to POC.

Derek Bouchard-Hall, CEO of POC, says, "POC has had a long and remarkably successful partnership with EF Pro Cycling and we are thrilled to continue it for another 4 years. What has stood out for us is their willingness to break with conventional thinking, be it on product development, how to support athletes, or bringing more fans to cycling. We also admire and are driven by their approach to high-performance, where they guide and challenge us in the development of the equipment they use. It's a true collaboration with demonstrable results. We consider it an honor to make the men and women of EF Pro Cycling safer and perform better with our helmets and eyewear."

Thanks to our partnership, EF Pro Cycling athletes race with the assurance that their POC helmets and eyewear meet the most rigorous safety standards and provide every competitive advantage that our combined research-and-development teams could implement. Lightweight, well ventilated, and incredibly fast, every POC product that our riders use has been designed to exceed the demands of top-class racing – regardless of what anyone else in the peloton is wearing.

“If you come with an idea, they have an open ear,” says EF Pro Cycling sports director and Technical Operations and Commercial Manager Andreas Klier. “What do we need? Do we want a TT winner? Do we want to have the coolest helmets in terms of heat management? Do we want to have the lightest product? Do we want to design a higher-definition lens?”

That way of working is in POC’s DNA.

“From the start, we realized that collaboration between us and the team was really unique because we were both really keen to push the boundaries,” says POC Hard Goods Director Magnus Gustafsson. “We were open to try out different things that were not really accepted from the beginning, really niche ideas or controversial ideas. That has always been something that both sides have been really keen on doing. We never look at what others are doing. We always start with the problem that we want to solve.”

Back in 2013, the peloton was shocked when we debuted POC’s DID glasses at the Tour de France. They didn’t just look cool; the DID’s aviator lenses provided superior optical performance and water-shedding properties. That set the tone for the next decade of our partnership. No one had ever seen a racing helmet that looked like the POC Octal when we first took to the start line wearing them in 2014, but the Octal offered better ventilation and better protection at a lighter weight than our competitors’ helmets. The peloton didn’t know what to think when we rolled down the start ramp for the first time in our POC Tempor TT helmets. Then they realized just how fast the Tempor’s unconventional shape sliced through the air.

Fashion will always chase speed.

That was the driving principle behind our development of the POC Procen Air – the race-winning helmet that brings the aerodynamics of a time trial helmet to the peloton.

The Procen Air is our closest collaboration to date. The challenge was not just to make a faster helmet. The Procen Air had to help riders perform better in a dynamic, fast-moving peloton, while still maintaining POC's rigorous standards for safety. It required high-definition optics, superior hearing, protection, and ventilation, and best-in-the-world aerodynamics. The result was different from every other road helmet that had come before it, but as soon as our riders saw the numbers from the wind tunnel, they were convinced.

“We knew that it was fast. We knew that it was a good product, but it was also a bit crazy,” says Andreas Klier. “I remember that when Magnus presented it and said, ‘How do we implement this with the riders?’ I said, ‘It's very simple. Show them the numbers and I don't have to explain more.’ Our women’s team immediately started to win in it and then the men's team continued to have some really good success with it over the year. Even Lachlan Morton was riding with it on his record-setting ride around Australia. How cool is that?”

Very cool.

Moving forward, POC and EF Pro Cycling will continue to innovate, employing world-leading sports scientists and engineers to produce faster, safer, better ventilated cycling helmets and eyewear for pro athletes and consumers alike.

Protecting riders’ health and safety as they pursue their dreams will always be EF Pro Cycling’s and POC’s priority and the basis of our continued partnership.

Here is to four more years of winning safely.