Yoshiaki Nagasawa is a Japanese bicycle frame builder who builds primarily Keirin track racing bicycles. He has a one-man shop near Osaka, Japan. Notable riders of his bikes include ten-time world champion track racing cyclist Koichi Nakano
Nagasawa was born in 1947 in Asahi, Chiba Prefecture. In his youth he took part in bicycle races in Japan, including the Japan National Championships Road Race.
TOKYO OLYMPICS SPARK INTEREST
‘The Tokyo Olympics in 1964 was what really sparked my
interest in cycling,’ Nagasawa tells Cyclist. ‘That was the first time I saw actual racing, and it was the starting point of everything I have done since. After that I started racing, and at my first major event someone recommended that if I was interested to continue in cycling then I should join his university, and its cycling club.’
It was through a friend at the Nihon University cycling club that bicycle mechanics first captivated the young Nagasawa. “It used to take me the whole night to prepare and assemble my bike for a race, so this was incomprehensible to me. But rather than just asking anyone how it could be done, I realised there and then I had to go and see for myself”.
After liaising with the Italian national team during the Olympics, the Japanese Federation arranged for two Japanese riders to embark on a spell of training and racing in Italy. ‘And when they asked me to go with them as a mechanic,’ he says, ‘I immediately agreed.’
CHOSEN FOR OLYMPICS!
Later he was chosen as a hopeful to race for Japan at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. But after colliding with a bus while training the year before the 1968 Games, he retired from competition. Giving up racing he decided to become a mechanic for bicycle racing. After graduating from Nihon University in 1970, he went to Italy and studied building under Ugo De Rosa of De Rosa Bicycles, and has been building bicycles in Japan since the late 1970s.
The 22-year-old arrived in Rome in 1970 and wasted no time in casting his net beyond the realms of the Japanese clique. ‘The World Championships were in Leicester in England that year,’ says Nagasawa of the Mallory Park motor racing circuit edition.
‘I was there as a mechanic with the Japanese team, and I met Sante Pogliaghi (of Pogliaghi bicycles – now owned by Basso), who was the Italian mechanic. He invited me to work at his shop in Milan.’
An 18-month introduction to frame building and mechanics with
Pogliaghi eventually led to a four-year apprenticeship with the legendary Ugo De Rosa, and it was under the wing of De Rosa that Nagasawa began to make his name.
‘Nagasawa came to me and said he wanted to learn,’ Ugo De Rosa, tells Cyclist. ‘I needed an employee and so I chose him. He was strong, and worked hard every day.’
FRAME FOR EDDY MERCKX
One anecdote romantically suggests that De Rosa once asked his newfound apprentice to build a frame for Eddy Merckx, whose Molteni team famously rode De Rosa bikes. ‘How?’ Nagasawa supposedly asked. ‘Like an offering to the gods,’ came the reply. But fables aside, this was the period in which Nagasawa learned his trade, and in due course it was the strong Japanese work ethic that would earn him his break.
‘I was at the track World Championships in 1975 with the Japanese amateur team,’ he recalls, ‘and one of the Japanese professional sprint team members fell and broke his bike. Our team was using frames made at De Rosa, and we had a spare, so I offered it. He got 3rd place – the first time a Japanese cyclist had made it onto the podium – and so when I returned to Japan in 1976 people knew my name. They said if I made frames, they would order them. So I started.’
Nagasawa returned to Japan in January 1976 and established his plant, Nagasawa Racing Cycle, in Kashiwara, Osaka Prefecture. Koichi Nakano debuted in the track world championships that same year and took the fourth place. He started to ride the Nagasawa frame bike in April 1977 and won an unprecedented 10 world titles, all with Nagasawa frames.
He keeps manufacturing frames to this day and is still invited to races as a mechanic.
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