'You can't pass the salt': Exploring professional cyclists' extraordinary superstitions and good luck charms

If you ever find yourself sitting around a dinner table with a group of Italian professional riders, whatever you do, make sure you pass the salt correctly when asked for it.

"It’s an Italian thing," Jayco-Alula’s Luke Durbridge tells Cycling Weekly in Saint- Jean-de-Maurienne before stage five of this year’s Tour de France. The bizarre culinary superstition is, he says, important in any team where there is an Italian influence. "You can’t pass the salt to any of the Italian riders at dinner, you have to put it [down] on the table," Durbridge continues. "So you pick up the salt, lean over, and put it on the table next to the person. If you pass it hand to hand it’s really bad luck, and they get very upset if you get it wrong."

They also follow the common superstition if the salt is spilled. "If you knock it over then you have to shake the salt in your hand and throw it over each shoulder. I didn’t believe in it until a couple of years back." 

Durbridge, a fairly typical down-to-earth Aussie, has reason to follow said superstitions. "I once knocked over the salt the night before the E3 Classic," he reveals. "The next day we had two broken collarbones, a concussion, and seven punctures as well. We thought, well, you know, we're just going to have to continue the Italian tradition. Most of our staff are Italian so they wouldn’t dare get it wrong."

Sparked by Durbridge's tale, we asked around the mixed zones and team buses during the first week of the Tour and discovered that bike riders’ superstitions, particularly among the Italian contingent in the peloton, extend far beyond the condiments at the dinner table.

You shall not pass

"We are really, really strange with our superstitions," Lidl-Trek’s Giulio Ciccone explains when we catch up with him in Macon. "I believe, for example, that when black cats pass in front of me when I am riding, I need to stop. I need to wait for someone to pass before me to take the bad luck, all these stupid little things.

"I also feel that I need to race with salt in my pocket every day," he adds, revealing that Italians don’t keep the salt sorcery to the dinner table. "I keep three grains grains in my pocket, the big grains."

We ask if he can show us and his manner instantly changes, a serious expression spreading across his face. "No way," he says. "I don’t want to lose it."

But what does it all really mean? Do the likes of Ciccone really believe that if you pass the salt incorrectly, bad luck will ensue?

The more we ask around, the more tales we hear of riders suffering bad luck after not following a superstition.

"I know that Mitch Docker started to believe in its powers [back in] 2018 or 2019, after he was joking around with the salt the night before Ghent-Wevelgem," says EF Education-EasyPost’s Alberto Bettiol.

"I said to him, 'You have to put the salt on the table, and then you can take it. You cannot pass it.' But he didn’t believe it. Then the day after, he crashed alone and we were saying to him on the radio, 'Look, now you have to believe it.'"

Bettiol adds: "I don’t know where it is coming from but it’s part of our culture, I guess. Even with my team mates now, I’m angry if I see somebody pass the salt directly without putting it on the table. It’s something that I really believe can affect you. 'It doesn’t cost you any extra energy, so let’s all try to do it,' I tell them."

As Bettiol and Durbridge’s anecdotes describe, superstitions can hinge on the smallest, most mundane of activities; ones with little thought process and no actual consequences, yet they still seem significant to an individual.

Listening to the Tuscan speak, I begin to think about how a friend of mine wears his watch with the face on the inside of his wrist, and my French uncle who discreetly marks a cross on a baguette before cutting into it.

When asking both of them about why they choose to do the things they do, they shrug their shoulders, and are unable to explain their actions. They have, however, admitted that to stop their quirks would be unlucky; the same applies to the Italian national champion and his colleagues in the peloton.

Bettiol tells me that he understands that his superstitions will seem unusual, and that he knows nothing would happen if he didn’t do them. Nevertheless, he is tied into an ingrained cycle which can be difficult to break, as sports psychologist Dr Josephine Perry explains.

"You don't want to risk not doing it"

"These are what I call 'must' types of superstition," she says when we describe these behaviours. "They’re the ones that you did it once, you had a great race, and now you attach doing that thing to being successful."

She adds: "You do not want to risk not doing it, because it’s usually such a small thing. It’s worth doing it just in case it helps you be more successful, even though you know that there is absolutely no logic to it at all."

I ask Perry whether she believes superstitions are on the rise within the peloton, a new fad fuelled by social media and the modern age. I cite the even more bizarre behaviour of Uno-X Mobility’s Magnus Cort as an example. 

By all accounts the Dane now listens to German industrial rock while 'helicoptering' certain body parts in the shower, having done it after a previous Tour stage win.

Perry explains that the whole concept is nothing new, and likens superstitions and rituals to any other habit that develops over time.

"There’s quite a famous one actually," Perry says. "Laura Kenny, when she was doing something like a European Championship as a junior, she got a wet sock when she was getting changed. She had no time to change her sock, she had to jump straight on the bike, and then she ended up winning the race.

"From then on Laura always stood on a damp towel before she put her cycling shoes on. There’s lots of other little examples like that."

I mention my uncle’s bread-cutting superstition to Bettiol as we perch on the bonnet of a team car before a stage. He throws his head back and laughs. It turns out he has a bread-related superstition too, he tells me with a grin.

"I don’t like it when I see a loaf of bread upside down on the dinner table," he says. "I also don’t like it if we are on a table for dinner with 13 people sitting around, I don’t like it and I prefer to sit apart to eat my dinner.

"I am a little crazy maybe, but all of these things don’t hurt anybody so I just try to do it."