Another equipment heavy sport is skiing. You can spend as much or more money on everything and the looks are quite important here too. Good setup for growing snobbery. Well, the difference betwen cycling and skiing is in the obviousness of skills. Not so good skiers can look as flashy as they want and they will still be seen at the hill and everyone will be able to see that they don't have it. And vice versa. One of the best skiers I have ever skied with answered to my foolish teasing about his 15 years old jacket: "I don't need equipment to look good at the hill". And that was sooo true.

Roadies who are only cool looking do not need to perform too much. They are either well behind or the others pass and forget them fast and they are left to impress themself.

PS BTW Talking about snobbery, I am even not going to comment the "20,000 immigrants" sentence.