Since 2020, every rider who joins a Bike Odyssey tour has, tucked into your welcome kit a Scicon Race Rain Bag – the same style of bag you’ll spot in the back of a WorldTour team car, now doing duty from the cobbles of Flanders to the switchbacks of the Shogun route in Japan. It’s a small thing to hand over on day one, but it’s quietly become one of the most useful pieces of kit we give our guests, and one they keep using long after the tour ends.
Built for the chase car, built for the road
The Race Rain Bag wasn’t designed with holiday cyclists in mind at all — it was built for professional teams, who needed a way to keep a whole squad’s spare kit organized in the back of a chase car so that when the weather turned, a soigneur could find the right rider’s dry jersey in seconds. That same problem – how do you keep a group’s gear sorted, dry, and easy to grab – is exactly what we deal with every Odyssey! It’s part of why we chose it: a bag engineered to solve a professional peloton’s logistics problem turns out to be just as good at solving ours.
One bag, everything you need
What makes the bag genuinely versatile is the way it’s organized rather than just how much it holds. At 16 litres, it’s compact enough to stow easily in a support van or hotel room, but inside there are six labelled compartments doing specific jobs – a central section built for shoes and a helmet, a separate pocket that keeps wet or muddy kit away from everything else, and dedicated spaces for jerseys, shorts, jackets and gloves. The shell itself is a tear-resistant, water-resistant fabric with a reinforced base, so it shrugs off being tossed in and out of a van every day for a week without complaint. Guests use it for exactly what it was built for – stashing a spare kit for a weather change – but just as often we see it repurposed as the one bag that holds cycling shoes, a rain jacket, chargers, and the day’s essentials, all sorted and easy to find without digging.
From the fjords to Kyoto – tested tour after tour
Because we run tours on almost every continent, our guests’ bags get put through conditions the original chase-car version was probably never tested against. On the Vikings route through Norway’s fjords, the wet-kit pocket earns its keep on the days the weather rolls in fast. In Japan on the Shogun tour, riders lean on it to keep gear dry and organized through humid coastal stretches. On Othello, tracing the old trade routes through Morocco, it copes just as well with dust as it does with rain. And whether it’s a support van winding through the Andes on the Che route or the ferry crossings on the Odyssey between Istanbul and Ithaca, it’s the one bag every guest can grab without having to think about where anything is. That range of use – race day rain kit one week, everyday travel organizer the next – is really the point of the bag. It was built to do one job extremely well, and it turns out that job translates to just about any kind of trip.
Made yours
Part of what makes the bag feel like a genuine keepsake rather than just another branded giveaway is that we brand them and also personalise them – each bag has the rider’s name and the tours they have ridden – kudos! It’s a small detail, but a popular one!
If you’ve picked up a Scicon Race Rain Bag on one of our tours, you already know how far it can travel with you. If you haven’t yet, it’s just one more reason to join us on the road.
