This Sunday you’ll have a chance to see one of the coolest and rarest bikes in the world: A one-of-a-kind Cinelli Laser Rivoluzione that broke the Internet when it was resurrected a few years ago and hasn’t been displayed publicly since 1987.
The bike belongs to Amy Danger, or who’s better known as @adangerPDX to her 46,000 followers on Instagram. Danger was just a casual cyclist in when a random stop into Cyclepath Bike Shop in 2017 changed her life.
“I was walking around into the back to pick up a few bike racks for a garage I was building for a client,” Danger shared in a phone interview today. “Then I saw, leaning against a wall, what I now know to be a track bike, but at the time I didn’t understand it. It didn’t have gears. It didn’t have brakes!”
The simple lines and design drew Danger in. She went home and Googled it. “A week later I bought my first fixed gear,” she recalls. Today Danger considers herself a collector and has a huge following on Instagram where she posts photos of the 30 or so bikes in her collection.
She’ll return to Cyclepath on Sunday as a featured exhibitor at Custom Bike Love, a free bike show that will feature 10 bikes from Danger’s collection as well as other custom bikes and vendors. Anyone with a cool custom bike is welcome at this community show-and-tell session.
The star of the show will be Danger’s most prized possession: A one-of-a-kind Cinelli Laser Rivoluzione. The bike debuted as a prototype in 1987, and after being battered and bruised and raced hard for years, it was almost sent to the scrap heap and lost forever. It was a fluke that Danger even came across it online one day in 2019. In a must-read 2022 post on The Radavist, Danger recounted what went through her mind when she realized a collector in Milan had it. “I lost my mind. I recognized it instantly and launched into a tormented spiral about how much I would love this bike but could never possibly own it.”
Danger sacrificed much of her collection to obtain the Laser and then spent a year on a full restoration.
What’s so neat about it?
“It’s hardly recognizable as a bicycle,” she shared. “It deviates so heavily from the double triangle that we’re accustomed to that, just to look at it, you know immediately something wacky is going on. The seat tube is completely missing and it also has a really interesting fairing on the front.”
I’m no expert, but the bike moved me when I first saw it in person at the 2022 Bridge Pedal when I bumped into Danger on a carfree I-405. Its wackiness is subdued by beauty and the ease with which one can imagine flying around on it. We’re lucky Danger brought it to Portland. And luckier still there were enough local craftspeople to help with the restoration, so Danger didn’t have to ship what she calls an, “incredibly precious piece of metal” back to Italy. Cinelli offered to restore it (and Danger worked with Cinelli’s owner Antonio Columbo and the bike’s builder Andrea Pesenti to plan the project), but Danger found ample talent locally to get it repaired and painted. “Portland is part of the story of this bike, and that thrills me,” she said.
You can share the thrills Sunday at Cyclepath between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm. The event is a benefit for Girls Build, a Portland-based nonprofit. The raffle will include prizes from RockShox Rudy, Smith helmets, Silca pump and tools, Ultradynamico tires, Wolftooth tools and swag, and Cyclepath merch. More info here.