Some background on Cervelo:

Canada's Cervelo Cycles a major player in Tour de France, Olympics
Jul 3, 2008

TORONTO — Some of the fastest legs in the world will pedal Canadian-made bikes in both the Tour de France and at the Olympic Games this summer.

This is the sixth year of the Tour that the bottoms of the multi-national Team CSC will be on bikes designed by Toronto's Cervelo Cycles. The 95th Tour de France opens Saturday in Brest, France. The 21-stage, 3,500-kilometre race ends July 27 in Paris.

CSC Saxo Bank includes previous stage winners Fabian Cancellera of Spain, Jens Voigt of Germany and perennial contender Carlos Sastre of Spain.

The Canadian men's triathlon team - Paul Tichelaar, Colin Jenkins and gold medallist Simon Whitfield - will be on Cervelo bikes in the Olympic Games. World champion Javier Gomez of Spain will also be on a Cervelo in Beijing.

CSC riders will race for their respective countries on Cervelo bikes in Beijing and the Danish men's track cycling team will also ride them at the Olympics.

Cervelo remains the only Canadian bike company in the Tour de France and has grown into a major international player in the business.

"Fifteen years ago, who would have thought good bikes, bikes that are at the top of the world, would come out of Canada?" asked co-founder Phil White.

"When we announced our relationship with the team in the fall of '02, the overwhelming response was 'Who?' They'd never heard of us. Now we feel we've got more of a target on our back."

Cervelo made its Tour de France debut in 2003 and the Tour's yellow jersey, which is worn by the overall leader, has been aboard their bikes for 11 stages since then.

After winning the Tour's overall team title in 2003, CSC hasn't finished out of the top three.

Successful riders in the Tour and Olympics are wheeled billboards for Cervelo.

But White says if he and co-founder Gerard Vroomen didn't produce a quality bike, the hype wouldn't help them sell it to the bike enthusiasts and age-group and weekend racers that are Cervelo's clientele.

"The Tour is a phenomenal publicity machine," he said. "To have your product on global TV every day for a month is a phenomenal way to publicize it.

"Is it necessary? I don't think so. We've built the company around this focus on engineering and making a better bike."

White and Vroomen are the authors of Cervelo's rags-to-riches story. They were McGill engineering students back in 1995 when they designed a time-trial bike for an Italian rider.

The rider's sponsor wasn't willing to put its talent on an unknown bike, but Vroomen and White went ahead in turning their project into a business.

They pooled their savings and got friends and family to loan them money. White recalls living on noodles and fifty-cent bread from a Portuguese bakery next door in Montreal during the company's early years.

White estimated three years ago that Cervelo was worth about $25 million. He's not willing to put a number on it now, but revealed sales have more than doubled since 2005.

While the bikes are designed and assembled in a west Toronto warehouse, the company relocated its headquarters to Neuchatel, Switzerland, in 2006. Vroomen moved there to oversee operations.

Cervelo has 10 distributors in Europe and while the company's sales in North America and Europe are currently equal, White expects demand in Europe to increase.

He estimates 25 per cent of the bikes ridden in last year's world Ironman triathlon championship in Hawaii were Cervelo's.

White doesn't believe the drug scandals that decimated the 2007 Tour will affect Cervelo's bottom line because entry-level riders aren't the company's target market.

"I think what happens is people might be upset and say they're not going into cycling and they're not going to get a bike," White explained. "If you're already into cycling, you're upset with that and you don't want to see that, but you're into cycling because you love it.

"Drug scandal doesn't make it any less enjoyable. It's still a great, fantastic, super-enjoyable sport. The fact that there's some idiot doing drugs in it isn't going to decrease your enjoyment today and tomorrow."

Cervelo's bikes range in price from $2,000 to $8,000, but add high-end wheels and the price can get as high as $11,000.

Of the company's 65 employees, a dozen of them are engineers. White claims no other bike company spends as much time and money on design and testing.

"We approach it the same way you'd approach the design of a Formula One car," he explained. "Everything is secondary to the performance. We're spending a lot of time and money on the engineering side of it."

He says the company spent a total of eight weeks testing the bikes' aerodynamics in wind tunnels last year.

The goal is to make the most lightweight bike there is that will also stand up to the pounding of the riders and the road. The frame of one of Cervelo's models weighs just 950 grams.

"It's really easy to make a light frame," White explained. "You just take material out and then you're a rock star. The real trick is taking the material out and not lose any stiffness. That's where the engineers really earn their bread."

White and Vroomen will travel with Team CSC during this year's Tour.

White says the Tour is a stressful and exciting environment because Cervelo's reputation rides on the bikes.

"There was the concern earlier on 'pray nothing goes wrong,"' he said. "We're pretty confident now because we've been with the team for five or six years and we're confident in our engineering skills.

"It's more 'I just want to win."'