Giro D’Italia. 1991. Passo Pordoi.

Two stunning photographs of the Passo Pordoi.

The portrait shot is surreal, the mountains actually look like they have been painted in. Amazing.

Found.

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Giro 1973.

Video. Giro d’Italia 1994.

The Giro.

A serious amount of scanning must have been done by Vuelta Italia for their Flickr spot and I must thank him/her a thousand times, as these photographs of various stages of the Giro throughout the years are like Gold.

Vuelta Italia flickr spot via GDB.

Roche 87.

7-Eleven Huffy.

“I asked John to build it light for the mountains but it needed to put up with some bad roads,” Hampsten said. “It was light but I know John was fairly conservative about going too light. His geometry is perfect; I never felt it wouldn’t get me out of the way when I was going around or through a crash, yet on the bad road conditions we experienced it was never unstable.”

“The year after ’88 we had Eddy Merckx as our bike supplier,” he continued. “He is the master at fitting bikes to riders and taught us not to get hung up on light bikes. Why save seconds on a climb and lose minutes on a descent? Slawta certainly has an old world style of making bikes that go up and downhill properly.”

Real nice read this one. Read the rest here.
Big up Hardysan for the heads.

Roche jersey Hotness.

Another one…

of the vintage Puma Giro photographs that feature my cat, Banton.

Birmingham, stand up!

Specialized take it back.

The Giro d’Italia is well underway and the Tour of California started yesterday, so naturally I have been checking the tech sections of VeloNews, CyclingNews, Road Bike Action, and other cycling sites to see which race bikes they are featuring. The majority of the featured bikes are pretty predictable, but the bright red Specialized Tarmac SL3s that the Saxo Bank riders are racing in the ToC immediately caught my attention. I mean…how often do you see pro team bikes these days with a single color frameset and understated graphics?

It turns out that the bikes have that paint and retro graphic scheme to commemorate the original Specialized Allez bikes used in the 1985 movie American Flyers. Road Bike Action’s tech feature explains that Bobby Julich, now a directeur sportif for Saxo Bank, came up with the idea of creating these commemorative edition American Flyers bikes for the team to ride in the race. See more pictures of the new and old Allez bikes at RBA. Personally, I really like the clean looks of these bikes. If Saxo Bank wants to get back to their regular team bikes immediately after the ToC, I would be happy to take one of these red bikes off their hands… I’d even pretend to be a fan of American Flyers if that is what it takes.

Always been a fan of Specialized and their S-Works bikes, especially, as above, the Red ones.

Words from Bicycle design.
Thanks Lee for the heads.

Anquetil Scan.

Seen.

Maglia Rosa.

The Giro d’Italia starts very soon ( the 8th ) and even though my viewing opportunities will be sparce I am still very much looking forward to it.

On Saturday, Amsterdam will witness the prologue as a time trial around it’s beautiful city, so lets hope the pros stay off those w**d cakes and get on with the matter at hand. That said those w**d cakes are extremely good!

Vintage Find.

Puma Giro cycling shoes bought today from a vintage store.
The cat’s name is Banton, our cat he is. He likes the shoes.

Zullo now in the UK.

Tiziano Zullo was born in 1952 in the North of Italy. He started racing at the age of fourteen and in the early seventies came into contact with the world of frame building through some of the Italian builders. He began building frames, under his own name and for larger brands, and in 1978 he started to export the Zullo brand. By 1985 he was the frame supplier of the Dutch TVM team, a relationship that lasted until 1992. Zullo frames were ridden on the Milan San Remo, the Northern Classics and the Tours De France, Giro díItalia, La Vuelta and World Championships. He experimented with Aluminium and still has a custom Carbon frame but the range is still predominantly steel.

Zullo now at Mosquito bikes.
Via Road.cc
Zullo on the web.
Trackies may also like this from Zullo.

11th August 1960.

My Tin Tin Coppi special Purchased from a flea market in Paris, July 2009 for 2 euros.

Giro 91.

Posted a link to these pics last week from the brilliant La Gazzetta della Bici but the link alone did them no justice so here I include a few more pics for you.

See more.

Games.

Brilliant. A whole website dedicated to cycling board games. I didn’t even know this sort of thing existed, but now I do I want one. Yet another item for me to search for on ebay! Oh the lady will be pleased.

I don’t know about anyone else but I want to play Les Cracks.

Go here for more weird and wonderful goodies surrounding cycling… and gaming.

Brilliant.

Coppi Mania.

“There’s a man alone ahead. His jersey is white and blue. His name is Fausto Coppi.” It was 1949 and the stage was Cuneo – Pinerolo, Giro d’Italia of course. The radio was the only way to follow the Giro at that time… and fans across Italy listened as one man on a bicycle taught a broken country to heal itself.

Read the rest of this amazing article here on Pez Cycling News.

Max Air.

A friend of a work colleague passed by the store last weekend on this: A Rad as hell 1985 Skyway Streetbeat.

They said at the time: Forget the ordinary with Street Beat, Skyway’s new full-on freestyle machine. It’s light enough to grab max air, and strong enough to beat the street. “Max Air” ! how times have changed, you would sound a complete idiot spouting that lingo today for sure.

Peep all of the excessive tubing though compared to todays basic utilitarian ‘Freestyle’ bikes… Nowadays BMX bikes look like scooters with pedals on and this thing looks like a spaceship with wheels on… I love it.

Props to you emalie ( hope I spelt your name right ) you got a real nice whip there.