With lots of cold winter training days ahead, Pedal will be posting interviews with some of the “movers and shakers” in the world of cycing. We hope you enjoy them, and please feel free to email us with your questions or comments for anyone that we interview, and we'll post them. Please send them to pedal@passport.ca and cc mattsh@hotmail.com

The Toronto-based Cervélo Cycles saw the light of day in 1994 when two engineers, Phil White and Gérard Vroomen, decided to take their work on developing faster bikes to market. The company began with a focus on triathlon, which quickly spread to time trials and road racing. After sponsoring a variety of smaller pro/am teams and road cyclists all over the world, Cervelo has upped the ante again as official biker sponsor of CSC, a top European professional Division 1 Team, thus making the Canadian bike manufacturer the first to compete in the Tour de France. Pedal spoke to Gérard Vroomen about the new relationship between CSC and Cervélo .

Pedal: Last fall Bjarne Riis announced that CSC's new bike sponsor would be Cervélo. How long was that deal in the making?

Gérard : It all went rather quickly. We started researching several teams, but quickly realized Team CSC would be by far the best match for us. Based on the riders, the staff and Riis, it was a no-brainer. We had no experience in this arena and all the “good advice” we got said to talk to three or four teams to increase our chances, but we decided to just talk with Team CSC. We had no interest in sponsoring a team just to be in the pro peleton, we have a whole string of road bike ideas that we want to test out at the highest level to get useful feedback. Not too many teams have the riders and management with the right attitude towards new ideas, but Team CSC does.

I met with Bjarne Riis, Alex Pedersen and the rest of the management team. During that meeting it became clear Team CSC and Cervélo have a very similar approach to their projects and share many of the same business values, which is extremely important in a partnership like this. A mismatch in this area can all but guarantee an unsuccessful cooperation.

On the bike side, Riis told me that throughout his career his ideas and feedback were always ignored, so the fact that we were specifically looking for that feedback was a big plus. Later on I tested him with the most outlandish designs we have, designs that even we don't fully believe in ourselves, all Riis asked was “will it work”. To my “I don't know” he replied we should build a prototype for Tyler Hamilton to try out. Exactly the response we were looking for.

Once we had gone through our current and future bike designs and the direction the team is taking, the whole process wrapped up quickly. By the end of August the arrangement was finalized..

Pedal: It's a fairly big team, how many bikes will be made total? How many bikes will each rider receive, on average? Which models will the team be using on the road, and in the time trials? Will there be any special tour TT or road bikes?

Gérard : At 20 riders the team is not that big, and we're only supplying the frames, our new Cervélo Wolf forks and our aero carbon seatposts, so it is manageable. CSC works differently from any other team I have ever seen. Because they are located in Denmark and not near most of the races and because they ride a double program, they have two gigantic trucks with equipment, one for Northern Europe and one for the South. Each truck contains two bikes for each rider, so that they always have the choice of two different road bikes depending on the type of race. This way, when a rider switches from the Northern to the Southern program or vice versa he doesn't have to travel with a bike, two bikes are already waiting for him in the other truck. On top of that, each rider has a bike at home and a P3 time trial bike (which they will travel with in some cases). This makes a total of six bikes per rider, something we can handle easily.

The training bike at home, the one they log the big miles on, is a Soloist. The other road bikes in the trucks are Soloists, Super Prodigies (especially in the “Northern truck”) and R2.5s (esp. in the Southern truck). Then there are Michael Sandstoed and Jimmy Madsen, who have P2T track bikes for the Six-Days. Tyler Hamilton also has a P2T, for fixed gear training.

Pedal: We all know about Bjarne Riis' fascination with technology; he's always looking for something faster. Did this factor into Cervélo's associtation with CSC? What's he like when it comes to bikes?

Gérard: It didn't just factor in, I think it is the primary reason there is this partnership between Team CSC and Cervélo. It is the reason we want to work with Riis, and the reason Riis wants to work with us. We've said it before, it's the first time we have met somebody with an obsession for bikes equal to our own. I don't think any other team would have chosen a partnership with such a small, innovative company just because they like the bikes, instead of picking a bigger, richer bike sponsor.

Pedal: Many bike sponsors of Division 1 teams pay to be the official ride of the team. We've heard about the large amounts of money that companies such as Trek have paid to be with USPS – can you give a ballpark of the price that Cervélo had to pay?

Gérard: For competitive reasons I obviously cannot answer that question. But everybody knows how small we are, we're no Trek. This deal really is a credit to Riis' priorities.

Pedal: Have things been pretty hectic since signing with CSC? What's it like at HQ these days?

Gérard: There's obviously a lot of work involved, after all we have gained two dozen very demanding customers. But two things have really helped us – first of all we have always had the philosophy that the pros ride the same Cervélos you can buy in the stores. We do this because our customers demand the real deal, and because it makes life so much easier for us when we don't have to do customs for pros.

So for Team CSC we don't have to make special frames or custom geometries the way most bike sponsors do, we simply pull stock frames from the racks, put the rider's name on it and send it off. That significantly reduces the amount of work to be done, I don't even want to think about what it would take to make custom frames for all these riders.

Second of all, we've really strengthened the Cervélo staff in the past few years, from sales to customer service to production to the “back-bone”, all are excellent and talented people. So that has allowed me to spend the time necessary to make sure everything with Team CSC goes smoothly, and with success. While I made sure all riders were happy with their bikes at the training camp, the team at home put everything in place for another strong year.

Strangely, the biggest headache has been painting. We've had numerous pros ride our frames in the past, but we always shipped those out bare so that their team sponsor could paint them. Now with CSC, we were supposed to come up with a cool paint scheme ourselves, but we couldn't paint anything until the team colors were finalized. Then it was full tilt to get the bikes ready for the team presentation, where they arrived with six hours to spare.

Pedal: Will you be going to many races in Europe this year?

Gérard: We'll go to races for feedback and to arrange the testing of our new road bike designs like the R2.5. Already, the training camp has provided us with a lot of feedback that will be incorporated into the final version of the R2.5. That has pushed back the public introduction of the R2.5 to April, but it will give our customers a better bike. The team needs the R.5 mostly for the Giro and Tour, so the delay is no problem on that end either.

Aside from the races in Europe, Team CSC has also been nice enough to include four US races in their schedule so we can do some local promotions with the team. They will race the Housatonic Valley Classic as well as the First Union Invitational, Classic and USPRO Championships.

Pedal: Cycling for Canada has had several recent developments that are pretty exciting: Mark Walters winning First Union; Michael Barry riding for USPS; the Road World's 2003 coming to Hamilton: how does it feel being the first Canadian-made bike company that will be in the Tour de France?

Gérard: Don't forget Charles Dionne's win in San Francisco! Although I've uttered the words “Cervélo will be in the Tour” several times now, it hasn't really sunk in yet. It will be special to be the first Canadian bike company in the Tour, but that isn't really our goal. Our goal is to be the best bike company in the Tour.

For more about CSC's ride, check out www.cervelo.com.