I bought this over the weekend from a guy one town over who repairs and resells old bikes. I was hoping to have an interesting story to share but I came up pretty empty.
Decals on the bike identify it as a Fuji Sagres. Fuji as a bicycle manufacturer has been around since the 1930s, and bikes are still being made under that brand, although the company has declared multiple bankruptcies and sold off the trademark. The youngest Fuji Sagres bike I was able to find was from 2019, and the oldest from the early 80s. So no help there.
I also noticed these stripes just below the seat, which I thought were important:
At first glance, I thought they were World Champion stripes, which, like the Olympic rings, have very specific rules on where they can and can't be used. This is a really interesting piece of competitive cycling that, as far as I know, doesn't exist in any other sport.
Without going too much into it, the leaders or winners of certain races get to wear special, unique jerseys for the remainder of the race or the year, depending on the event in question. The most well-known of these is in the Tour de France, where the current leader of the race gets to wear a yellow jersey. If you remember those yellow rubber Livestrong bracelets (disgraced 7-time TdF winner Lance Armstrong's cancer charity), that's why they're yellow.
Every year there's a world champion race, and the winner gets to wear a white jersey with rainbow stripes for the year, and the following year until the next world championship. It looks like this:
.jpg)
My thought process was that if Fuji sponsored a world champion at some point during their history, maybe they produced special edition bikes during that time, and this might actually be a neat piece of history!
Unfortunately, the colors on the World Champion jersey are (in order) blue, red, black, yellow, green, while the colors on my bike are blue, yellow, black, green, red. So I don't know what these stripes are for and it also doesn't give me any clues as to the age or history of the bike.
I do believe it's fairly old, since there's open-cell foam on the handlebars and by the time I was looking at competitive bikes, around 2000, you only saw closed-cell foam. So pre-2000, which is still 25 years old.
The only other piece of information that might be of use is that the rear axle is 3/8" diameter, and the modern standard is 12mm. I'm not sure when this change took place though. I might look into it some more and post an update, but for now — Hey! Cool! Bike! Now I'm able to get some exercise!
That's the most important part, really.