L'aile de la victoire. Le pneu "Soly" - an original poster by Mich, 1922, advertising the French cycle trade.

French track cycling between the 1890s and the 1920s drew crowds that few sports could match, and the trade advertised accordingly. Tyre and cycle makers put champions on their posters the way car makers later used racing drivers - the machine sold because a famous man had won on it, and the poster was where that argument was made.

Grand Prix racing in France was run on closed public roads long before purpose-built circuits were normal, which is why the posters look like town advertisements rather than sports bills - the event and the place were the same thing. A win carried straight into the following season's sales, and the manufacturers made sure of it.

Mich - Jean-Marie Michel Liébeaux - was a prolific caricaturist whose advertising work for the French tyre and motor trade traded on humour rather than glamour. His posters use exaggerated, cheerfully absurd figures, a deliberate contrast to the elegance his contemporaries were selling.

Restored from a high-resolution scan of an original lithograph, with the scanning marks and mount board removed so that only the poster itself is printed. Printed to order on cotton-fibre archival paper, with optional mounting and hand-finished framing in our own workshop.