What are the Tour de France Riders Really Riding?

cycling, Lance Armstrong, Tour de France | UltraRob | Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 8:24 am

This is not a Specialized fork.
Photo ©: James Huang/Cyclingnews.com

Just because a bike or component has a company’s logo on it doesn’t mean that’s who made it. Over the years top pro riders have used custom bikes painted to look like bikes from the team bike sponsor. Lance Armstrong at times used a Litespeed painted to look like a Trek. There’s a good article on cyclingnews.com that details some of the customized bikes or re-labeled components at this year’s Tour de France.

Even when I was on the Schwinn/Grand West Outfitters mountain bike development team, we had bikes that weren’t what they appeared to be. When Schwinn came out with their Homegrown frame, they wanted us racing it but demand was greater than their production capacity. The had the .1 frame that had the same geometry but I believe was made in Taiwan instead of the US. It also was a different aluminum and the frame weighed slightly more than the Homegrown. The color was also different.

As I remember they shipped the frames unpainted to the US where they were painted like a Homegrown. When we got them the decals weren’t even on. We spent an evening at Grand West applying decals and building up the bikes. Some of us considered putting the decals on in unique ways but I think they all ended up where they were supposed to. I got asked several times at races how I liked my Homegrown.

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