![]() I paid a hell of a lot of money for that: £5,500.” “Bearing in mind that Alan Oakley came back on November 3, 1968, I’ve got a hub-dated MkI Chopper which is from December 11, 1968. “I’ve got one which nobody has beaten yet,” he adds. ![]() Of alloy wheels, so a few came out with steel wheels on them. “768 special edition jubilees were made,” he explains. The holy grail of Chopper collecting, according to Sykes, is a certain version of the special edition Chopper released for Christmas 1976 to commemorate the Queen’s silver jubilee the following year. “Some of them come with pictures of the kid next to the Christmas tree, and some have the original receipt with them showing how much they paid down at Halfords.” Also, since they were handmade in Raleigh’s Nottingham factory, the odd ‘Friday afternoon job’ with upside-down stickers sometimes crops up too. The cult of Chopper even has its own creation myth: the late Raleigh designer Alan Oakley, flying back from a research trip to the US to see the Chopper’s pre-cursor, the Schwinn Stingray, famously sketched designs for the first prototype on the back of an airmail envelope. ![]() Raleigh made three ‘marks’ but hundreds of different options three, five and 10-speeds dropped handlebars and a few rarities where the factory had to shift old stock and blended old parts with new. Part of the appeal of collecting Choppers comes down to their sheer variety. I did a deal with a guy in America, for nine MkIIs and four MkIs for the bike.” “The most I paid for one was for a 10-speed, brand spanking new. I'm hoping that the Dutch buyers, Pon, who also own the presitige bike brand Cervelo, as ridden by British pro David Millar, vow to stop all the sentimental retro-fetishising of the Chopper and make the Raleigh name mighty, credible, modern and all grownup again.“The most expensive I’ve seen went for over £7,000 and that was a boxed MkI 10-speed still wrapped up in its box,” Sykes adds. The TI Raleigh team (which was, by the way, Dutch) had winners at the Tour de France and the Olympics. But here's the thing Raleigh could've been a contender. Their bikes are carbon fibre and titanium sleek, efficient and chrome-free. Modern cyclists are obsessed with weight and speed. Clumsy, heavy, ill-conceived, and downright dangerous, it's one of those kitsch, jokey 1970s things that, like Findus pancakes, onyx ornaments and racist comedians, hasn't travelled well into the 21st century – despite a celebrity-owners club that includes Damon Albarn, David Beckham and Lady Gaga. So how come I'm not shedding a tear for the Raleigh? Well the truth is that the Chopper was an utter pig of a bicycle. A kid in my village once upped the ante by getting his dad to replace his Chopper's handlebars with a car steering wheel. In the 70s Raleigh had an incredible 60-70% market domination of bicycle sales in the UK and the tarmac was awash with not just Choppers but also Chippers, Tomahawks and (later) Grifters. Cruising around my village and attempting wheelies on my Chopper made me feel free, rebellious and part of the gang. It had a long fat, lazy-boy seat upholstered like a sofa, "Ape hanger" handle bars, a cool kick stand, a Sturmey-Archer "suicide" gear stick that seemed to have been lifted from a Chevrolet and blinging chrome mudguards … that rusted almost immediately. A thinly disguised knock-off of the American Schwinns you'd see in Spielberg movies, it was styled like a motorbike with a big knobbly wheel at the back and small one at the front. To an East Yorkshire boy entranced by the Banana Splits and Evel Knievel, the Chopper seemed impossibly exotic.
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