Do you find that your dreams are filled with you getting your hands on a bike ridden by the pros? Well with the Tour over, Canyon look ready to ship out some of their professionally ridden bikes. These bikes come with real life experience of professional racing, and some even have the scars to prove it.
First up is Alex Dowsett’s 2014 Aeroad. This medium sized Aeroad weighs in at 6.95kg and is the first generation of the highly popular bike, bearing the Englishman’s name and a few nicks to go with it.
Decked out in Movistar green and blue and running Campagnolo Super Record EPS, Dowsett’s Aeroad would be perfect for any fan of the Spanish team. Then there are the tubular Boras. To fulfil every rider’s pro-dreams the bike runs Conti’s Competition Pro Ltd Competition. These are team issue only tyres, meaning you can’t buy them anywhere, no matter what that know-it-all down your local club says.mHowever at the end of the day, the bike is a used bike and with no real provenance to say that Alex Dowsett used it as a race day bike and not a training one, may make you question paying £4,499 for a used 2014 bike.
Then there is Nairo Quintana’s extra small 2014 Ultimate CF SLX. The Colombian’s tiny bike shares the same setup at Dowsett’s Aeroad with Super Record EPS but swaps out the tubs for Campagnolo’s Eurus clinchers. This suggests that this bike might not have been a race day bike but Quintana’s training bike. Even with the drop in wheelset quality and the fact that this bike could have just been Quintana’s training bike, the German company are asking £5,599 for it.
If you’re a Team Movistar fanatic, then you may be interested. However with all this talk of ‘cycling history’ and ideas of sporting memorabilia, where does this rank in the grand scheme of things?
Step up to the plate Babe Ruth. The legendary baseball player, George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth was arguably the greatest player of all time, a claim that is backed up by his New York Yankee Jersey that was sold for nearly $4.5million. This is the most expensive piece of sporting memorabilia ever.
Then a little bit down the list there’s the first known set of football rules written called Rules, Regulation, & Laws of the Sheffield Football Club. Hand-written in 1858, the book details the early rules of the world’s most popular sport and was sold in 2011 for £881,250.
Lastly, right at the reasonably attainable is one of Sir Bradley Wiggin’s TdF winning Dogma 2s. Having won a competition, a SKY customer received one of the bikes that Wiggo actually rode to victory in 2012. He promptly put the bike up for sale because he wasn’t going to squeeze ‘into tightly fitting Lycra and use it every now and again to keep fit.’ The bike sold for £10,400. Make the Canyons seem quite cheap don’t they?
'Babe Ruth' jersey photograph courtesy of Dan Gaken