2022 Bike at bedtime Trek Madone Armstrong and Hirst For this evening’s Bike at Bedtime we’re heading back in time to check out Lance Armstrong’s Trek Madone, designed by British artist Damien Hirst and ridden by Armstrong on the Champs Elysées at the 2009 Tour de France. This bike eventually sold for half a million dollars. 2022 Trek Madone Lance Armstrong Damien Hirst The original idea of this bike was to mark Lance Armstrong’s return to cycling after initially retiring in 2005, and the selling price of this one-off creation makes it the most expensive bike in the world. It was one of seven of Armstrong’s Trek bikes that went up for auction, which in total raised $1.3 million for LiveStrong (link is external) . Many of these still feature in lists of the world’s most expensive bikes. > Lance Armstrong auction: Damien Hirst ‘Butterfly bike’ Hirst is well known for a series of artworks in which dead animals are preserved and he made no exceptions to this recurring theme when designing Armstrong’s Trek Madone.
Hirst used real butterfly wings lacquered onto the frame and said, "I wanted to use real butterflies and not just pictures of butterflies, because I wanted it to shimmer when the light catches it like only real butterflies do, and we were trying not to add any extra weight to the bike."
Unsurprisingly, the project attracted some negative attention, with some animal rights activists branding the use of real butterfly wings as ‘barbaric’. The Bontrager wheels […]
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