1984 olympics bronze medal winning murray

This is a bike from when I was an amateur. If you look at the chain rings you can see the Olympic logos. So in 1984 we got these bikes and equipment – chain rings, cranks, and stems with the Olympic logos. We rode these in the ’84 Olympics in Los Angeles. You can see the chrome fork and stays and they did that for durability so they wouldn’t get scratched. But it made them heavier and I think it actually affected the tubes. We couldn’t use lighter tubesets and chrome plate them – the steel gets brittle.  That’s why they got away from the chroming process. Even having the number plate tab on the frame was a highlight then. “Wow, I’m actually in a race where they have number plates!”

Notice the double toe straps. That’s how we did it before clipless pedals. It was possible to pull out of a pedal in a sprint. The track guys even used triple straps! You wouldn’t keep them tight in long races, but everybody would start cinching down 10 or 15 kilometers out to be ready for the sprints. Didn’t want to do it too far out or your feet would fall asleep.

It has Campagnolo seven-speed on it. When I started we had just five cogs. When we got to these seven-speed clusters we were amazed and wondered how far they could take it. Today we’ve got eleven-speed cassettes. This is also the first truly adjustable Campy seatpost so we could finally start dialing in saddle adjustment. One single bolt and if you overtightened the bolt it would break and the whole works would come apart. Same thing on the Cinelli stem. The bikes we raced were pretty dangerous compared to today’s bikes.

Single pivot brakes, too. My forearms got pretty big from all the effort it took to use them. Now it’s so much easier with dual pivot designs.

Downtube shifters, everyone got their fingers in the front spokes not paying attention. Everything was friction back then, indexed shifting didn’t happen until around ’83 or ’84 and all the old guys claimed we didn’t need that but it sure made things nice. We got good at shifting accurately, but a lot of sprints were won and lost not being in the right gear. Today when the guys are sprinting they have the ability to make a quick shift jump, but back then in the sprint if you found yourself in too big or too small a gear you had to sit down and shift and find your way back through the lost momentum.