Sometime in the mid-1970's, one of the strongest local racers in southern Connecticut showed up at a race with a "high-end" Japanese bike. Shocking. Couldn't get my head around it. You deliberately bought a Japanese bike? To race on?
Then as now, a few brand names dominated the enthusiast bike market in the U.S.: Schwinn, Raleigh, Peugeot, maybe one or two others. Small bike shops carried Japanese bikes, not by choice, but because the bigger shops had the big-name brands sewn up.
A large proportion of the C&V people here got into high-performance bikes in the late '70's or thereafter, by which time the better Japanese bikes and components had won respect, so the idea that Japanese bikes were more or less scorned must seem incomprehensible to them. All I can say is that, from 1964 (when I started racing) until the day that guy hit the starting line with his Japanese bike (probably a Fuji, but I'm not sure), I'd never seen anything other than English, French, Italian, and American (Schwinn Paramount, Bill Boston, etc.) bikes at races.
Last edited by Trakhak; 03-30-24 at 04:45 AM.