It’s the beginning of the New Year, a good time to look back at the history of bicycles…well, two of them.
You probably know Greg LeMond had his own line of bicycles. But did you know one of them was a “beam” design? The “V2 Boomerang” was produced in 1994. The carbon fiber frame and fork weighed about 2.5 pounds and sold for $1795. Four seat posts were available for “seat heights between 52 – 56.5 cm” and since the seat post could slide horizontally, the seat angle could be varied from 72 to 82 degrees.
In 1989 at the World Championships in Japan, the U.S. men’s team time trial squad rode these Serotta bikes. Notice anything interesting? How about the 24″ front wheel/700c rear wheel configuration?
Happy New Year! Great photos! I have the Winning Magazines that those photos are also published in somewhere. The second photo is from the World Championships (1990?). The second ride is Lance and the first is Andy Paulin or possibly Jim Copland (who is a Hunstville Alabama boy. His nickname for the 88 Olympics was the Alabama Slammer). I think I read that the 600c wheels allowed them to run the paceline 2 1/2 ft shorter and it allowed them to run a front disk as the 650c disc was too tricky (andy Paulin’s trade team, Ten Speed Drive tried this on some team Guerciotti bikes). Its is interesting as Lance was transitioning from tris that he has the reverse seatpost where as Paulin has a seatpost with setback.
I want to say that it was some large firm like Mitsubishi that was to be involved with the V2 Boomerang. Didn’t Bilato and at another time, Clark-Kent make the steel Lemond pre-Trek bikes?
Thanks for posting the blasts from the past photos!
Yep, a bunch of Winning magazines landed on my doorstep a while ago. More blasts coming, from there and from Cycling Weekly, a UK publication, fondly known as “the comic”.
Corrction: The team was Jim Copeland, Nate Reiss, John Frey, and Lance. I remember Jim saying that they had mechanicals which slowed them down. I think they were flexing the 55t chainrings or something like that. The guy leading the rotation is probably John Frey as Jim used to run the Specialized shoes as he was on the Sunkyong-Montgomery trade team and their shoes were black. I am trying to find a photo that I cam across a while back of Leonard Harvey Nitz’s 1984 Celmin kilo bike. Crazy thing with dual 24″ wheels and wires (like a Slingshot bike) to stabilize the drilled out seatpost. Crazy out of the box engineering!
As we all know, the 24 in. Front wheel concept makes riding so much easier.
That is pretty cool that some used it for racing.
Fun article.