well, i finally got this bad boy back on the road! and a long road it's been...
this bike started life in 1984 to commemmorate the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, capitalizing on the hype surrounding the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. i purchased this bike in late summer of 1988, pre-owned, from "Ten Speeds, More or Less" in Columbus, Ohio (remember that shop? it was a great one!). i'd been eyeing it for weeks, hemming and hawing, and with some encouragement by local pro Gerry Fornes (remember him?), made the move one fateful day.
i originally built the bike up largely as you see here with classic campy bits. once built up, i rode it for the 1989 season up until another fateful day when i came home from the bar to find that my house had been burglarized and the Ciöcc was gone! needless to say, i was distraught and spend the night filling out police reports and whatnot. thankfully insurance covered it and i replaced it with a similar steel Bottecchia on which i finished out my collegiate and early post-collegiate racing days.
fast forward to 1993 and i get a phone-call from one of my former teammates who's roommate apparently "had a friend that bought it at a flea-market." Yeah, right! Despite my skeptism of this person's story, I repurchased the frame for a couple hundred bucks and was reunited with my beloved Ciöcc. despite my happiness, it promptly ended up in my basement sitting around gathering dust until 1998 when I had it restored by Assenmacher. i built it up with modern campy bits and rode it as my primary race bike until 2002 when i picked up a modern Colnago for that role at which time the Ciöcc was promptly relegated to doing unglamorous duty on my indoor trainer (of course, the frame tubes were completely wrapped in plastic to protect from sweat and corrosion).
now it's 2004 and the Ciöcc is re-born!