This article was produced in association with Van Rysel
You can’t exactly call it a rags-to-riches story because Van Rysel’s owner, French sports superstore chain Decathlon, has an annual turnover of around €15 billion. Plus, the brand has been at the top level of cycling before, and has even sponsored the AG2R team once upon a time – Jaan Kirsipuu’s 2001 aluminium Decathlon Penta Pro is on display in the brand’s enormous Lille HQ as a reminder. But an extraordinary story it most certainly is.
Just when we thought an order in cycling had been established – Pinarello dominates the Tour de France in the 2010s, then it’s Colnago’s turn in the 2020s, while Specialized dominates one-day racing – along comes Van Rysel with a bike that is not only the equal of any of them, but is available to buy at a lower price. When the Van Rysel RCR Pro went on sale on Decathlon’s website in April, with a price of £9,000 for the full Shimano Dura-Ace pro spec with Swiss Side wheels and Deda integrated cockpit, it sold out instantly. And it finished the 2024 season by being ridden to second place in the World Championships by Ben O’Connor, with only the unbeatable Tadej Pogačar in front. O’Connor was also the only other rider apart from Pogačar to finish in the top five of two Grand Tours in 2024, with fourth in the Giro d'Italia and second in the Vuelta a España.
“Decathlon was very well known for affordable aluminium bikes, so it was a bit of a shock when we arrived,” admits Van Rysel’s chief product officer Yann Le Fraillec. “But don’t forget we are very old in the business and have been doing carbon bikes for more than 30 years, but we were out of the game in terms of aerodynamics and integration.”
Van Rysel was founded in 2019 and had a lot of catching up to do. Key to the very fast development of the Van Rysel RCR Pro – two years between the product brief and delivery to the market according to Le Fraillec – was not only the scope of the Lille HQ to research and develop every element of the bike in-house, including 3D printing entire frames – but also the brand’s readiness to work with partners with expertise in specific areas, such as aerodynamics. As luck would have it, one of these was just over the road.
“We didn’t know how to make a fast bike, so I was like, okay, I need to find an engineer, I need to find a wind tunnel... a lot of people,” remembers Le Fraillec. “There’s Bike Valley in Belgium, Silverstone... We know all these wind tunnel areas. But out of the window from my office there’s a building with ‘ONERA’ written on it. They basically work for the army: rockets, submarines, drones, this sort of stuff. I called them anyway, as their neighbour. They said, we’re working with very high velocity so our systems are not set up for bikes, but we’ll put it down as an internal project until someone wants to take it on. The place is full of passionate bike riders and you say, ‘Hey guys, you can design your own bike.’ So they jumped in, we worked with them in computational fluid dynamics, cut the frame into slices and they optimised every slice to have the fastest bike. We did ten iterations, we printed them in 3D, put them on our shoulders and carried them over the street. We also tested competitor bikes and the results were unbelievably good. So we selected one out of the ten designs – you choose between weight, stiffness, mechanical qualities, and we chose this one with this particular layup of the carbon. We said, okay, we have a gamechanger.”
While the bike was in development, the brand started talking to professional teams. “We visited two or three different teams when we decided to go back to the WorldTour,” says Le Fraillec. “We didn’t always get a warm welcome. ‘Where’s the bike?’ Er, it’s a 3D printed one at the moment. ‘Okay, when can we test the bike?’ Six months before the beginning of the season. So it was a big challenge. You have to convince people, show them the data, tell them you have the best bike in the WorldTour and get them to sign a contract before you have the actual bike.”
However, it was a different story once Van Rysel gave prototypes to Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale. “The first time the team tried the bike, we were in Spain. We left the hotel. After five kilometres they came back to the car and said, ‘No discussion, you have a crazy bike, no doubt about it.’ All the team were convinced they could go with us.”
Maxime Delabre, Van Rysel’s chief marketing officer, continues: “When we first had this discussion with the Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale team, the riders hadn’t tested it yet and one of them, Benoît Cosnefroy, was at the end of his contract, due for a new team or to renew his contract. He heard about the fact that we were in talks with the team and he said publicly, ‘I’ll choose depending on the equipment we get. So that was a bit of pressure on us. And he decided to stay. One of the other riders said, ‘It’s been 16 years I’ve been riding in the pro peloton and this is the first opportunity I’ve had to ride such a bike.’ So when you hear those guys telling us that, it’s really something.”
Van Rysel and Decathlon signed a five-year contract with the French team – a long time for a contract with a professional outfit. “I really wanted to build something on a long-term basis for various reasons,” says Delabre. “One of the reasons was to prove that our products are the best on the market. It’s not only wind tunnel tests, you need to prove it in the field. You need to do it on a long-term basis to get cyclists on board. What they will find in our stores is what they see on TV winning races. Plus, you need some lead time to develop it with the team. We want to develop it with them and then ride it.”
A rejuvenated Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale have taken 30 victories in 2024, plus the team classification at the Giro, and dominated the Vuelta with Ben O’Connor until Roglič finally wrested back the red jersey. Then there was that second place at the Worlds behind Pogačar and ahead of Mathieu van der Poel. Not only has 2024 been good for proving that the RCR Pro is up there with the best, it has also allowed Van Rysel to work with the team on the next generation of race bike.
The RCR Pro was launched as an aero all-rounder, but we got a sneak peek at a pure aero bike prototype with a very distinctive marbled paint scheme being tested by Felix Gall and Sam Bennett in July. Le Fraillec explains: “At the beginning of the project we were aware that to make a lightweight climbing bike and a very good aero bike at the same time is impossible. To launch two high-end top models at the same time would be crazy for us. So I preferred to focus on an aero-light bike that can perform in 80 per cent of race conditions. It’s also the best for consumers, who might ride the same bike when they go on holiday in the mountains as when they’re training at home on flat roads. With the RCR Pro we can reach 6.9kg. If we introduce a pure aero bike, we want to keep the same aerodynamic performance for the RCR Pro – we don’t need to improve it – but save some grammes. This is the next challenge and we are already working on this bike. You can’t save many grammes in the frame now because we’ve reached some limits that are hard to beat without decreasing the frame stiffness. So if you want to save grammes you lose aerodynamics or stiffness. It’s a question of balance.”
Le Fraillec clearly doesn’t lose sight of consumer demands – so now is the right time to ask how Van Rysel has set the RCR Pro’s price so low. “There’s always one question. Why is your bike so cheap? First, it’s not cheap. When you have to pay £9,000 for a bike, that’s not cheap. This is a price that’s a good price, and how do we achieve it? We have a good business model that’s balanced between all the product categories. We’re not depending on only the bike to make profit. So we can propose a fair price, not a cheap price, for all categories.”
Delabre continues: “We are the only cycling brand covering all the categories – bikes, helmets, sunglasses, shoes, electronics, home trainers... It’s the complete offer. We want to be one of the top five cycling brands in the world and we want to simply design the best performing products for every level of cyclist. We work with pros to learn more rapidly because they are the most demanding athletes in the most demanding environment. All of the insights we get from them we will use to develop innovation that we will duplicate and adapt to every level of cycling. We start with the most demanding and we extend that to anyone.”
It’s going to be fascinating to see what 2025 brings for the Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale team riders and for Van Rysel customers.
