About a year ago, Krit, a reader of this blog, contacted me with this story and images.The bike in question, is actually purported to be the first Colnago Oval Cx..

 an absolutely stunning example, said to have been made by Ernesto Colnago himself..

“Not sure if you can recall. We did talk a year ago about Colnago CX that I bought from a collector in US. The one that is claimed to be the first Colnago Oval CX made by Ernesto himself and it has no serial number. Due to extended custom clearance process, I just got this bike few week ago. …I was told by the previous owner that this Oval CX, together with another including Arabesque and others were all trade show bikes that were made for the Paris, Milan and New York in 80’s. After the last stop which was New York, these bike were not shipped back to Italy but sold to a famous bike shop in New York called Conrads, located in Manhattan which was an upscale bike shop. This might be because Conrads bike shop was a major importer of Italian bikes to US at that time but I am not sure if this bike shop is still existed. There was a guy bought these bikes from Conrads and sold them to a collector that I bough this bike from.”

Krit also was lucky to be able to purchase and original Colnago Arabesque from the same vendor, quite a pair to find!

(I look forward to seeing the Arabesque Krit!)

If any other readers have any rare Colnagos , please feel free to share here (or ask for an appraisal ) .