On a related note, Team USA got their GT Superbikes either at the 1996 Olympics or days before.

This bike was radically different than the bikes the they'd been training on:

SB-1 (Aluminum...basically a Tiemeyer (Mr. Tiemeyer was on the GT engineering team)):


SB-2 (Carbon. No seat stay + no top tube = flexy):


I recall a conversation with one of the athletes who raced one of these at the Olympics and his comment was something like: You don't want to change your shoe laces before a big event...and here we were on brand new frames going into the Olympics.