A question of SPORT

Harley-Davidson's Sportster S has a famous model name that dates back to the Fifties - but is it really one of the family? Picking the Sportster highs and lows from 65 years of production should provide the answer...

- Roland Brown

Jaws hit the floor last year when Harley-Davidson unveiled the latest in its long line of Sportsters. Sure, most motorcyclists had expected the new-generation V-twin to be a fair bit more sophisticated than the familiar air-cooled Sportsters, which had finally fallen victim to tightening emissions regulations.

But the Sportster S is a very different motorbike - not only liquid-cooled and high-tech but also unashamedly muscular and powerful. Harley itself says it's the first chapter in a whole new Sportster book. In many ways it seems more like a successor to the V-Rod than to the old Sportsters, with their traditional pushrod-operated engines and twin-shock chassis.

So, has Harley blundered in relaunching the Sportster family with a bike whose 121bhp output, fat tyres and IMU make it not so much a relatively affordable retro bike, like the old models, as an upmarket competitor for the likes of Ducati's Diavel? Time will tell, but meanwhile, a look back at the Sportster story shows that Harley is not abandoning tradition by giving the latest family member some fire in its belly.

1957 XL Sportster: Iron horse with a name

The original XL Sportster's name was significant on the model's launch in 1957. Sportster was an evocative title for a high-performance motorbike, just as it still is today. And to emblazon it in capital letters across the crankcase was a real statement of intent.

Especially as in those days Harley didn't really do names. Admittedly, the factory had released a V-twin called the Sport back in 1919, and more recently the bigger Hydra-Glide and little 125cc Hummer had been given names, too. But generally, Harley had stuck to differentiating its models with letters. The XL Sportster stood out further by having two of those rather than the normal one.