Hi,
Does anyone use this helmet? I’ve noticed that it is not approved by USAT. Has anyone ever been called out by an official for using it?
Cheers!
Every year at Wildflower a couple of euro pros get told last minute that their helmets don’t have the required CSPC sticker for US racing and scramble to find a loaner helmet at the last minute.
The Uvex is CE certified (for Europe), but not CSPC for US. Make sure to get a helmet with a CSPC sticker. Since CSPC is a stricter standard, many EU companies who designed a helmet for CE don’t want to make completely new molds just for some limited US sales.
Stricter standard? Be serious. You can buy a $6.99 helmet from WalMart that has CSPC certification.
Here’s a newsflash for you - I live in Europe and have a Giro helmet that is CE certified. Guess what it doesn’t have CSPC certification because guess what - I don’t live in the US. It’s the same helmet, no fancy NEW mold for US standards.
You think a $6.99 helmet from Walmart is safer than a Uvex or Giro that doesn’t have the all encompassing mighty CSPC certification? Get real.
All participants shall wear a protective head cover, undamaged and unaltered, which meets or exceeds the safety standards of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).
That is what USAT says. Now I don’t know if that means any other safety organization with similar standards or not. In Canada it is an in kind sort of deal. Don’t know about the USA. Can you contact someone at USAT?
Of course it still only matters what a RD “thinks” the rule says or is.
Go to Wallmart,
Buy 6.99 piece of turd helmet.
Lift CPSC sticker, apply to 150 € uber helmet that has DIN ISO EU standard and is valid in the whole world except the USA.
According to the USAT the USA lives in a vacuum, and it has problems explaining what these funny people with strange accents come from. In light of this, and due to their stories being false (the world is flat, and the sea falls of the edge, duhh, so how are you going to come from “overseas”? Double duhh) they must buy get made in China lid (that everybody knows is next to Idaho) and quit whining.
G
Stricter standard? Be serious. You can buy a $6.99 helmet from WalMart that has CSPC certification.
Here’s a newsflash for you - I live in Europe and have a Giro helmet that is CE certified. Guess what it doesn’t have CSPC certification because guess what - I don’t live in the US. It’s the same helmet, no fancy NEW mold for US standards.
You think a $6.99 helmet from Walmart is safer than a Uvex or Giro that doesn’t have the all encompassing mighty CSPC certification? Get real.
Just curious … if you race a WTC event in Europe, are you required to have a CSPC sticker on there or do they take CE stickers also?
Stricter standard? Be serious. You can buy a $6.99 helmet from WalMart that has CSPC certification.
Here’s a newsflash for you - I live in Europe and have a Giro helmet that is CE certified. Guess what it doesn’t have CSPC certification because guess what - I don’t live in the US. It’s the same helmet, no fancy NEW mold for US standards.
You think a $6.99 helmet from Walmart is safer than a Uvex or Giro that doesn’t have the all encompassing mighty CSPC certification? Get real.
Take a look at these quotes, from two different helmet manufacturers:
From Catlike’s Facebook page, talking about the Whisper Plus:
“Our distributor in the USA is Serotta company (www.serotta.com) You can contact them for more info, and they will tell you where is the nearest shop where you can buy a Catlike helmet, also Competitive Cyclist carry the USA CPSC approved Whisper Plus. If you buy them by our distributor you wont have any problem, but if you buy it from Europe the helmet wont be certified for USA. Only CPSC Catlike helmets are selled in USA throught our distributor.”
And for the Giro Advantage 2, Lava mag was talking to Bell’s (Giro’s owner) Advanced Concept manager about a new helmet being developed:
“But Lance and Alberto said it was faster than the Advantage 2, and that was our goal: to be sure it was better than the American or European version of the Advantage 2”.
I was at a race where one guy to my left had the European Advantage 2, and the official was talking to him about it. He found a US Advantage 2 further down the rack, and held the two of them next to each other. They looked the same from the outside, but when he flipped them over, the US version had noticably thicker helmet walls. So, same model, different molds.
Antwerp 70.3 requires that the helmet is marked with the CE EN1078 so I would guess that helmet rules are run according to the local regulations. IMO it would be foolish for WTC, Challenge or any worldwide promoter / event owner to impose their own preference in an area such as this. A potential litigation minefield in the event of an accident.
The annoying thing being that I would guess that there are plenty of good quality branded helmets manufactured in one factory in the same moulds to the same spec and have been put through all the various standards tests for different markets that are only stickered for the region where they are sold. But then the cynic in me thinks that if this is the case and it would only add a penny at most to the cost to include all the stickers, how many more helmets do they sell every year to people who wish to race internationally? (pro tours not included as I’m sure they have their own “variations” on everything)
Stricter standard? Be serious. You can buy a $6.99 helmet from WalMart that has CSPC certification.
Here’s a newsflash for you - I live in Europe and have a Giro helmet that is CE certified. Guess what it doesn’t have CSPC certification because guess what - I don’t live in the US. It’s the same helmet, no fancy NEW mold for US standards.
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You think a $6.99 helmet from Walmart is safer than a Uvex or Giro that doesn’t have the all encompassing mighty CSPC certification? Get real.
Just curious … if you race a WTC event in Europe, are you required to have a CSPC sticker on there or do they take CE stickers also?
CE means Commission Européenne… So probably no, not at all, we race with russian coton tank helmets here.
Don’t forget to bring one, labeled CPSC, or CCCP, if you come racing in Europe, the officials at the bike check in will be very very happy to see you. The red badge is mandatory.
A different mould doesn’t mean less protection. It means different construction.
At least in Canada we allow the use of helmets that have been certified by standards that are similar to our CSA.
Cycling helmets are compulsory and must be approved by an officially testing authority, such as:
• CSA (Canadian Standards Association)
• American National Standard Institute (ANSI Z-90.4)
• Snell Memorial Foundation
• The National Swedish Board of Consumer Policy
• Others to be announced.
Too bad the US can’t figure out that other countries also enjoy protecting their citizens heads.
One wonders if Formula 1 drivers have to worry about this. Apparently the Bell Formula 1 helmets are not CSPC certified.
I would have thought it were an insurance liability thing for the race organizers.
In a US race the helmet must be certified to the national safety standard. In europe, then it’s the european safety standard.
I’m guessing that getting a helmet approved to any standard is an expensive process for the manufacturer. They obviously have to recoup that in the form of sales and if they don’t have a large presence in a particular territory then why splash out the cash…
Most of the time standards organizations make money by selling the stickers to manufacturers. Its Unlikely that the sticker is a penny. More likely its a couple of bucks. I assume the EU has one standard, US, Can, have there own. No idea about Aus, Japan, China, South Am, Africa etc. But even if a helmet meets all standards, certifying it and buying the stickers would be a lot of money for a tiny fraction of participants.
Styrrell
Ahh that makes sense. So it is likely that the same helmets are going to each of the testing agencies and then the brand buys the appropriate number of stickers for each regional market’s sales.
So in that case I’ll need to budget for a new helmet too in addition to the repair of a set of wheels and bike case (TSA inspection and “careful” repacking) if I want to go trans-Atlantic racing.
I seem to remember a few years back there was an Mdot branded (logo on either side and front) pointy helmet available in Europe with the relevant CE-EN1078 standard. Wouldn’t that have been embarrassing if the owner travelled to the US for a WTC event and got banned from using it? Perhaps that’s why they were only about for 1 season.
Stricter standard? Be serious. You can buy a $6.99 helmet from WalMart that has CSPC certification.
Here’s a newsflash for you - I live in Europe and have a Giro helmet that is CE certified. Guess what it doesn’t have CSPC certification because guess what - I don’t live in the US. It’s the same helmet, no fancy NEW mold for US standards.
You think a $6.99 helmet from Walmart is safer than a Uvex or Giro that doesn’t have the all encompassing mighty CSPC certification? Get real.
The CSPC is an objectively tougher standard to meet than CE. No debate we have on this forum will change that.
How a company receives these various certifications differs for each organization. For instance, the CPSC, a U.S. government agency, does not require manufacturers to submit samples to CPSC test centers. Rather, it relies on the manufacturers to have the helmets tested and to regulate themselves. However, the CPSC does randomly test helmets, and imposes penalties for companies whose helmets are marked with the CPSC certification, but fail to meet the standard.
In contrast, in order to receive CE certification, the manufacturer is required to send several samples of the helmets to CE test centers in Europe, where CE technicians perform the tests. Once a product receives certification, the manufacturer is cleared to import the helmets. Regardless of whether it is a single- or multiple-impact helmet, receiving CE certification is crucial for sales outside of the U.S. As Jake Brandman of Pro-Tec puts it, almost all developed nations besides the United States require that helmets sold there have the CE certification.
(from a discussion concerning Pro-Tec helmets. The article was aimed at skate boarding helmets but discussed bike helmets as well as they are both single use helmets).
No, it can be CSPC, CE, Snell or whatever the equivalent is in Australia/New Zealand.
As long as you have a helmet that is certified by a regional standard you are good to go. They don’t descriminate just because of where it’s certified.
Not the two Giro Advantages I own. I have fallen foul of this very thing in the US.
They wouldn’t let me race with my Euro Advantage so I had to buy another one or not race. The two helmets are absolutely identical in every way - no difference.
There are difference between the Advantage and Advantage 2 so maybe that was it unless it had been modified by the owner.
Yes of course it is. I’m sure the $6.99 CSPC Walmart lid would stand up and hardly have a scratch on it compared to my measly CE certfied Giro lid.
CE means Commission Européenne… So probably no, not at all, we race with russian coton tank helmets here.
Actually…CE means “Conformité Européenne”. It only ensures that the products placed on the market in the European Economic Area (EEA) conform with the essential requirements of the applicable EC directives for whatever is being manufactured. Due to the diversity of the 27+2 nations that make up the EEA, and the requirement for them to endorse the “legality” of these European Community Directives…the level of safety might not pass the same testing in the US. This isn’t to say that the EEA countries care LESS about their bike riding citizens than the US, it just means that they have to do the whatever they can to satisfy the directives agreed upon by the European Community as a WHOLE.
This is the same problem where there is no reciprocity on approving pharmaceuticals in both the EU and the US. Different safety standards…again, that’s not to say that one community cares less about its patients than the other…they’re just DIFFERENT and aren’t mutually recognized.