Cilo Swiss 50th Anniversary Bike 1983

Cilo was a Swiss manufacturer of bicycles that was in production until 2002. Their bicycles were made on the shores of Lake Geneva in Romanel-sur-Lausanne in the Vaud canton.
Cilo is an acronym for Charles Jan Lausanne-Oron. The abbreviation of the name from the manufacturer "Jan" was transformed in "i" for pronunciation purpose in French.
"Lausanne-Oron" refers to a holding in Lausanne, associated with the industrialisation of the city at the turn of the 20th century.
The company was founded in 1914 and became rather successful.

Hans Knecht became world champion in 1946 riding a Cilo bicycle; other notable riders include Ferdi Kübler, Hugo Koblet and Tony Rominger.
Together with Aufina, Cilo co-sponsored the cycling team Cilo–Aufina from 1980 to 1986. Later-on in 1992 they teamed up with Atari and Ciclolinea.

The bike we present here is based on one of their popular models. The Cilo of the late 1970s and early 1980s was a beautifully crafted racing bicycle made of Reynolds 531 with the typical Swiss attention to detail. Regarding the design, Cilo usually went the classic way with little extravagance and decent colours. The material and geometry were as classic as the appearance.

It is this plain decency that forms a really great canvas for the fine dashes of gold, which are provided by the rare Campagnolo 50th anniversary groupset.

To celebrate the 50th Jubilee of his company, Campagnolo released an initial number of 5.000 pieces of this extraordinary groupset. During production they made excessive use of titanium an golden emblems. And every groupset got its very own number engraved.
Number one went straight to Campagnolo's own museum.
Since the first batch of 5000 sets sold out almost immediately, Campagnolo began to produce more of the sought-after anniversary gruppos to meet the expectations of the market. They just stopped when the number of 15.000 groupsets was achieved

Today this groupset still is - if anything - even more sought after then when it was first released.
On our Cilo, number 13028 forms a beautiful contrast of silver, gold and a vibrant lapis-lazuli blue.
This machine is as good a ride as it is a spectacular piece to look at!