The curse of the green motorcycles

Since Halloween is coming up I thought I'd ask about this.

When I was young and started riding in 1985. it was an urban legend in my area that it was bad luck to paint your bike green or ride a green bike. Something very bad would happen to you.
This was a well known and commonly observed superstition for many years in my area. There were no green road bikes around until it started showing up on plastic bikes in the late 80's and newer riders started coming along.

I have kept this superstition to this day mostly because of tradition. But, I will admit that another part of it is not wanting to jinx my luck. (25 years with no major events) I have never ridden and won't ride a green bike.
I do however think that green is a pretty good looking color for a bike. So no disrespect for the people with green bikes.

So my questions are.. Has anybody ever heard of this superstition and what are some of the other motorcycle related superstitions you have heard of?

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Nope, never heard of the 'green' superstition either...then again, never owned a green bike either...and then there are the several accidents on black bikes and the several on red bikes....hmmmm

i have heard of this...in the early 80's green bikes were bad luck....for suzuki,yamahas,hondas......really bad luck........

they knew if you saw a green bike that they were gonna have bad luck all weekend....and nightmares

I heard somewhere that in japanese culture green is a colour of bad luck...this is apparently why kawasaki racing adopted it...kind of like stickin' it to the man with the bright lime green. Eddie seemed to do ok with it...

Didn't seem to hurt this guy...

Never heard that one but I did have a green CB250 back in the 70's. Never came off it. The bike before that one and the bike after I came off but now that I think of it never the green one

Apperantly, the curse is the reason that the Kawisaki race bikes were painted green. The engineers wanted to prove that there designs were superior to any supposed curse. They chose the lime green since it was the most green in their opinion. At least this was how it was characterized by the tv program "Twist the Throttle" about Kawasaki that I saw last year.

testarossa wrote:

Apperantly, the curse is the reason that the Kawisaki race bikes were painted green. The engineers wanted to prove that there designs were superior to any supposed curse. They chose the lime green since it was the most green in their opinion. At least this was how it was characterized by the tv program "Twist the Throttle" about Kawasaki that I saw last year.

I saw that as well. Actually this "green" is bad luck in racing goes back a long way.

So i don"t wanna paint Amy's ZX-550 green?

trianglelaguna wrote:

So i don"t wanna paint Amy's ZX-550 green?

She's no going racing with it, is she? I say go green.

I had never thought about how the Japanese culture saw the color green as being the start of the myth. But that makes sense and it improves the myth for me... Because it's not important that things like this be true, they just have to sound good.

I had heard it came from the British racing green, from the 1920's... It seems that a lot of green British cars found the walls back then.

It's good to find out that there is a bases for this superstition and that me and my friends aren't just nutcases. lol