Sport
Raleigh had a long association with cycle sport. Most notable is the TI-Raleigh team of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980 Joop Zoetemelk won the Tour de France on a Raleigh. In the mid-1980s the Raleigh team was co-sponsored by Panasonic. In 1984, riding Raleigh-badged bicycles, Team U.S.A. scored several impressive victories at the Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The company also supplied bicycles to the French Système U team in the late 1980s where Laurent Fignon lost the 1989 Tour de France to Greg LeMond by 8 seconds. The company's special products division made race frames, including those used by the Raleigh professional team of the 1970s. Presently Raleigh as a company owns the Diamondback Bike brand as well. During the 1980s Raleigh also supported British professional teams, including Raleigh Banana and Raleigh Weinmann. Raleigh's most notable riders were Paul Sherwin, Malcolm Elliott, Mark Bell, Paul Watson, Jon Clay and Jeff Williams. It also sponsored a mountain bike team in the early 1990s that also raced in road events. In 2009 it was announced that they would be founding a new British cycling team called Team Raleigh-GAC.
Read more about this topic: Raleigh Bicycle Company
Famous quotes containing the word sport:
“For generations, a wide range of shooting in Northern Ireland has provided all sections of the population with a pastime which ... has occupied a great deal of leisure time. Unlike many other countries, the outstanding characteristic of the sport has been that it was not confined to any one class.”
—Northern Irish Tourist Board. quoted in New Statesman (London, Aug. 29, 1969)
“Rabelais, for instance, is intolerable; one chapter is better than a volume,—it may be sport to him, but it is death to us. A mere humorist, indeed, is a most unhappy man; and his readers are most unhappy also.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney (b. 1940)