May I direct your attention...

... to the WOMBATS towel at the left. Yes... over there.

Now, one maybe not be eligible for WOMBATS membership or even drink tea, but these towels are massively useful. Just ask any Hitchhiker.

Partly it has great practical value - combined with a few zip-ties/toe-straps/course marking tape you can fashion a loincloth out of it to protect your modesty as you change out of gloopy muddy kit after a cyclocross race; you can sit upon it at the sidelines of the course and ring your cowbell for the poor bastards still slogging it out in the soupy muck; you can soak the corners in various flavors of carb gels to sustain you in emergencies; use it as a non-functional mini-cape (remember it's 8"x19") during the Halloween CX race at Astoria; wet it for use in hand-to-hand combat or to heckle racers from the sidelines; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious beer fumes emanating from certain segments of the spectators or avoid the gaze of the OBRA officials glaring at you for accepting a beer hand-up; you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. Although this is highly unlikely at a cyclocross venue.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a fellow racer (fellow racer: one of those other poor bastards out there with you) discovers that you have your towel with you, he will automatically assume that you are also in possession of a toothbrush, Hammer Gel, soap, patch kit, flask of non-OBRA-compliant booze, compass, map, ball of string, pit wheels, wet weather gear, pit bike etc, etc. Furthermore, the fellow racer will then happily lend you any of these or a dozen other items that you might accidentally have "lost". What the fellow racer will think is that any man or woman who can navigate the length and breadth of the race course, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where their towel is is clearly a cyclocrosser to be reckoned with.

With a WOMBATS towel, one will always know where one's towel is.

WOMBATS founder Jacquie Phelan has a stash of these fabulous towels for sale. Head on over to her site jacquiephelan.com and drop her a line to get your bad self one (or two or three) of these fabulous, 8"x19, purple and pink, jacquard loomed beauties.

So go do it.