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Harley-Davidson Black Rod Looks Like a Soccer Player’s Ride

Soccer is that peculiar European sport people over there like to call football. It is, of course, unlike everything we know to be football, but Europeans are quirky like that.
Harley-Davidson Black Rod 21 photos
Photo: Thunderbike
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Just like it happens with American football stars, European soccer players, the good ones, are held in high regard there as well. That means people like to know what they’re up to, what they’re driving, the whole lot. And a man by the name Nigel de Jong is part of that high-profile group.

The 36-year old presently conducts his business in Qatar, being on the payroll of a soccer team called Al-Shahania, but was once one of the pillars of the Netherlands national team. As such, people love to know what he’s up to, and companies jump at the opportunity of tying themselves to his name.

So did German custom garage Thunderbike, which about six years ago worked on a project for de Jong. The soccer player wanted a custom VRSC, and something called Black Rod came to be.

The VRSC - V-Twin Racing Street Custom - is the muscle bike family made by Harley-Davidson from 2001 to 2017 to fight off (mainly) Japanese machines. A great deal of variants was created this whole time, including something called Night Rod.

de Jong’s build is based on the Night Rod and is a “very similar version” to the one we have here, created by the same German garage a while back.

Handled in the usual Thunderbike fashion, the Night Rod was turned into something a bit more spectacular than it’s former self and re-Christened Black Rod. It now sports new fenders, new wheels, and a very dark paint job, all wrapped up around a body riding on air suspension and a new forward control kit.

We are not being told how much the bike cost de Jong, nor how much this similar one is worth either, but as usual we can venture a guess, and in this case 3,000 euros (or $3,600 at today’s rates) worth of extras seems about right.
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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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