1969 Giro Poster

The Rapha blog just turned up this fantastic Giro d'Italia poster from 1969:

So cool!

If you're in London, you can pick one up here. New Yorkers can wait patiently and hope a Rapha pop-up shop turns up sometime soon...

Olympic Posters

The Olymperials is an cool collection of original Olympic Games posters, housed in Annecy, France, and now available to view online. The site has been getting some press on non-cycling blogs, so I thought I'd do a post and focus on the cycling posters.

Mexico 1968

Munich 1972

Montreal 1976

Moscow 1980

Los Angeles 1984

Seoul 1988

After 1988, the posters get a bit, well, crap. Some of the designs are, frankly, feckin' woeful. But the earlier posters, like the ones above, are great. It's interesting how the variety of posters produced for each Olympics really explodes in the 1960s, from one or two per games before that, to over two hundred produced for the 2004 Athens Olympics. It really is a great collection, I recommend checking out the page here.

Colonialism by Bike!

"I need to get my oppression on. Where are those natives?"

I love this poster! Thanks to Neal-ZH over on chifg.com (the Chicago fixed-gear message board) for finding a whole bunch of vintage bike poster images online. This isn't necessarily the best looking, but I think it's hilarious. "As used by our colonial overseers." What a selling point! Actually, I have no idea what the text at the bottom says, but if any of our Dutch readers (I see you, Nijmegen!) could drop me a line with a translation, that would be great.

[edit] Apparently, the poster says "In use by the Dutch and Dutch Indian army." Thanks, Tom!