dirty sundays

This is Juliana Furtado's original GT XIZANG race bike from the early 1995 season.

The bike must have been produced in 1994, although it has no serial number which makes it impossible to figure out the exact production date.

 

She probably got her bike in late 1994 and raced it at the Hawai stage race in January 1995, which she won.

 

It was also used during the 3 first races of the 1995 World Cup season in Cairns (1st place), Madrid (1st place) ,Houffalize (3rd place) and possibly Budapest (4th place), according to the photos I found.

(Keep in mind that the pro's, especially those at bigger teams, may have had several identical bikes at the same time.)

 

Parts are mostly original, it took me a long time to figure out the handlebars, which at the end, thanks to Mark Dawson's photos on www.fattirefotos.com, I found out that they put a cut out True Temper frame sticker on both sides of the bars. I still don't know for sure what bars she used, although those are True Temper right now.

 

The wheelset it came with, was a 96' rear wheel and a 97' front wheel, both with M950 hubs.

This bike should have M910 hubs with Mavic SUP 117 rims.

 

When I took a closer look at her 97' season bike at the MTB Hall of Fame, I realized that it had the exact same wheelset, just the other way around. After about 1.5 years, I finally convinced Joe Breeze that we should swap the front wheels, so their bike is all original again and I have at least 2 matching wheels. 

 

I don't wanna replace the wheels as those are her original wheels that she raced and there's a UCI tag on the front hub - now - thanks to Joe. 

 

The word is that she was using a longer custom made pedal spindle on the left side, although the bike came without pedals.

 

There are marks on the brake levers from the zip ties holding the race numbers as well as marks on the downtube from the crud catcher zip ties. 

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I received the bike from Marc Gullickson, who's wife Margy rode it occasionally. They had gotten it directly from Juli, when they all were still living in Durango. Marc was a successful pro-racer and former GT team mate of Juli.