Definitely tough bike market. My opinion too is the spend cervelo has at world tour + P6X development without rate of return sales are/were costly expense lines. And sales model of LBS having bikes on floor vs say a Trek Project One program. Have a tester in store, customize online, have on site ready 4 weeks later. Less risk to LBS. consumer gets to plug and play and customize paints etc.

Layer on Canyon DTC via Velofix in USA and Cervelo in a pickle with their distribution model.

That said its going to take Trek and Canyon longtime if ever to win Kona pier count. So maybe cutting back is much to do with why spend? Already own tri market!

Europe road scene must be a sales opportunity through PON distribution though no?

Good luck to you & team. I enjoyed my Cervelos over years.

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@rhyspencer

The Hooker Cat 1 road bike predates the Soloist by at least 7 years, certainly there were other "aero" road bikes before the Hooker but the aero features were likely more stylistic than functional. While not the first aero road bike, the Soloist may have been the first mass-produced commercially successful road bike with actual aero performance.

From 1987

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Swimming Workout of the Day:

Favourite Swim Sets:

2020 National Masters Champion - M50-54 - 50m Butterfly

Hey rhys,

Thanks for your support over the years. Your right, Pro Tour teams are expensive but they offer the opportunity to have our bikes ridden to their limits which in turn helps us design better bikes. Feedback from teams has been very important to us and the main reason we started the Cervelo Test Team back in the day and continue to choose teams which provide access for our engineers.

That said, triathlon has always been a focus from day one and has allowed us to really push the limits of design. Cervélo has succeeded because triathletes are more willing to try new ideas if makes them faster. We are definitely still investing heavily in developing faster triathlon bikes and will not be sitting back simply because we have dominated the Kona count ;)

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Jakub

As for Sara's follow up post, I wasn't aware that she had purchased her bike, but quite honestly, that's an even bigger endorsement of the brand that if she was indeed sponsored.


Many triathletes think that the bike companies have warehouses full of bikes that they just hand out willy-nilly. As you well know, AD, this is NOT the case.

Like most businesses, it's run on a pretty lean model these days, with very little "surplus" product.

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

Rhys,

Interesting times in the bike business with big changes in the sales model. As I noted previously, the whole of the bike/tri business is down. The last two years probably the "worst" in the past 20. Add in the disruption of other ways to buy bikes and accessories - direct, online etc . . and you have a business that is in significant transition right now.

Cervelo's strength, is two-fold - Historically they have been true leaders in R & D and Design and, perhaps more importantly, they have a strong brand. Played right, that is a powerful 1-2 punch in any business!

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

I will add one thing here and the reason I now have an R3 and S5 is Cervelo's customer service has been beyond exceptional for me. First it was just meeting them in Tremblant, Kona, and some local races they are fantastic people and go above and beyond in their service. They helped me out in the most stressful situation I could ever imagine and I made sure that my last 2 purchases were Cervelo.

They don't just hand them out?!? :-)

If I'm a Canadian (Toronto-based) triathlon and road bike manufacturer, I let all of my long-course sponsorship contracts run out, add up all of the money, and give half to Lionel Sanders half to Lucy Charles. But I'm not...

If I'm a Canadian (Toronto-based) triathlon and road bike manufacturer, I let all of my long-course sponsorship contracts run out, add up all of the money, and give half to Lionel Sanders half to Lucy Charles. But I'm not...

AD - smart move! :-)

Can't go wrong with that!

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Steve Fleck @stevefleck | Blog

I agree with this. I had one of the original p4’s that had the frame crack behind the seat post. They replaced it with a new p4 no questions or issues.

When I bought my 2016 Trinity...i got it for a little less than the 2017...I had ordered a 2017 Trinity Advanced and 8 weeks into it the Giant Dealer called me up that the order had been canceled and Giant was not making any 2017s until the rest of the 2016s they had were sold. Crazy. This was mid-January of 2017.

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

You are preaching to the choir.

I got a Hooker Cat. 1 the first year they were available (ca. 1991, IIRC).

Before that (in the early 1980s), I had Melton aero road bike made of Reynolds 531 Speedstream tubing and hung with Dura-Ace AX components.

When the Melton cracked, I replaced it with a 3Rensho frame that had an aero fork and stays, as well as the back-of-the-downtube boss for the AX shifters.

After the 3Rensho was stolen, I replaced it with a Trek Y-Foil, then a Cervelo Soloist.

After riding the Soloist for >15 y, I finally bought a new bike last summer, a Fuji Transonic.

IOW, except for a couple of backup/winter/trainer bikes, I have been riding nothing but aero road bikes for almost 40 years.

I suspect the sponsorship of lower-level teams is based on companies profiling the markets and behaving accordingly: they may be of the opinion that youth riders are strong candidates for becoming lifelong customers, so providing free gear to a sixteen-year-old today means you get a degree of brand loyalty for when they're no longer racing at the top but still do quite a bit of riding. Additionally, underage competitors bring their families to races and events, and are probably statistically more likely to come from active families - so if your daughter is kicking ass on her Specialized every weekend, and you decide to treat yourself to a new bike, you're more favourably disposed to Specialized. By sponsoring one underage team, you get exposure to an entire group of families and a positive brand association that can last for decades.

A typical thirtysomething AGer, meanwhile, is probably out doing solitary training and may not be in the sport for more than a few years - and the bike that makes sense for those years is visibly different to the bike that makes sense a decade later when the former triathlete decides to get a nice bike for weekend spins, so there may not be the same marketing value in terms of either the longterm relationship with the athlete or the broader exposure to a potential market.

Incidentally, I'm not sure that Americans who haven't been to continental Europe fully grasp how big a deal pro cycling is over here. Someone like Peter Sagan or Tom Boonen is enormously famous in a way that no triathlete will ever manage - based on audience engagement on social media, Sagan's ridiculous motocross goggles on the Roubaix podium produced about $300,000 worth of publicity for the manufacturer. Tom Boonen's retirement party was an open-air party complete with stage, band and DJ (link here, and well worth watching for the dancing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbzzUBjo5o8). At the top level, cycling is a vastly more valuable sponsorship opportunity in most cases.

As a long time observer and former cycling industry employee, I can tell you that there have almost always been ebbs and flows with different brands. Road and Tri is way down for reasons no one has really done any proper research on - lots of guesses and opinions but no really data informed views.

Right now mountain biking is experiencing a resurgence which is really positive. Cervelo unfortunately is left out of this space because it was not their wheelhouse. This has lifted some brands like Scott, Santa Cruz, Specialized, that have benefitted from the second mountain bike boom, but others like Cannondale, Cervelo are left on the sidelines.

The other real problem in the bike and outdoor industry and the reason I left is the typical Private Equity Owner approach. So many top names in outdoor recreation and bikes have been cannon fodder for PE, whose typical approach is to try to make a big strategic play in the short term. So often it does not work, they bring in smart but arrogant owners who have never worked in an organization effectively and have no clue how to sell a consumer durable, which is nearly impossible.

You look at brands like Patagonia, Trek, and Specialized who have stayed privately owned vs North Face, Cervelo, Schwinn, Raleigh, Cannondale, and others who have been victims of these PE owners. There is no long term vision for these guys and when things start heading south or getting challenging they turn tail and bail.

Is road really down? It appears that one half of the category is booming, but it's the side of the spectrum opposite of Cervelo's core competency. I speak, of course, of gravel/adventure bikes. Yes, Cervelo has the C-series, which, by all accounts, is a pretty brilliant bike....if you want a nice tarmac-biased multi-surface endurance bike. But the market seems to be shifting farther towards the margin between "road" and "mountain" everyday, while the C-series, in it's current iteration, is stuck on the "tarmac" side of the middle thanks to limited tire clearance and packability.

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"They're made of latex, not nitroglycerin"

Road is down way more than gravel is making up for it. The Gravel crowd is the N+1 crowd, the road boom was new users, disease ride warriors, mamils, etc. Road races are seeing 1/2 the participation of 5 years ago.

Really though can't that first sentence apply to any number of industries? I guess you say that.

It's been an interesting thread to follow being a past Cervelo athlete that had bikes and potential bonuses only in the contract. 3 years retired, I'm down to a C5 as my only bike.

Amy (spouse) had the opportunity to be paid to ride a lesser bike in one of her last few years, but it would have been getting paid to go slower. As pros, we didn't have the financial luxury of paying for another frameset or bike, so we would have kept the bike we had even if it meant not having a contract until something equal to or better came along. Even now, I'll probably always have a Cervelo bike as long as my LBS keeps carrying them.

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Brandon Marsh - Website | @BrandonMarshTX | RokaSports | 1stEndurance | ATC Bikeshop |

Yes you are right - the issue is that PE swoops in when owners see trouble or challenges to begin with, or who want to cash out. It happens in a lot of industries, but for some reason cycling is attractive to them probably because cycling is a sport for the same type of persona that PE firms are stacked with. I am not some anti-capitalist, I think PE has a role but there have been so many bad case studies in the outdoor recreation world for them. I am racking my brain trying to think of one that is going well, and I can't think of one. Camelbak / Giro / Bell will probably be the next casualty because of their pairing with the same owners who bought up a bunch of firearms brands.

I like Cervelo and ride one too, I just think that the market has gone so soft for them for the past two years they are in a race to drive down the spend side as their revenues have declined. I have no intention of replacing my P2, it is a great bike.

One of Amy's girlfriend's from college works for Vista/Savage. I was actually really surprised to see that it's more like shooting sports + outdoor sports as opposed to outdoor sports + shooting sports.

Camelback has their hands in everything with quite a few "tactical" branded products as well. I don't know, if the pushback from within the more cycling/outdoor community remains high, then yeah, I could see those brands getting dumped. I think that the shooting sport brands will be fine.

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Brandon Marsh - Website | @BrandonMarshTX | RokaSports | 1stEndurance | ATC Bikeshop |

North America problem with Canyon? I have two friends with Canyon bikes. (Based in Europe)
Isnt most sponsored Canyon guys from Germany btw?

I alway read that brands are dropping pro triathletes but I've never heard anything from any of the ITU guys comment on this. I'm fairly certain that a good majority of those athletes are all sponsored in some form or fashion. I'm sure some of the BOP maybe don't but I've never seen them complaining about lack of support. Not sure Cervelo is in that game however as I've not seen any of there frames recently.

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"Train so you have no regrets @ the finish line"

They don't complain as much because they have federation support. Along with federation support, in many countries, comes sponsor support from the companies supporting the federation. Some federations will also have apartments for their athletes or offer some kind of living stipend as well.

ITU/national federation athletes have a completely different setup. LC is very much "free agent" and it's entirely up to the athlete to make ends meet.

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Group Eleven – Websites for Athletes / mikael.racing / @mstaer

Bicycle Retailer and Industry news just posted that Vista is selling Bell, Giro, Blackburn as well as Savage/Stevens. Also selling Copilot, Raskullz and Krashco children's helmets and Jimmy Styks paddle boards. They'll maintain the focus on ammunition sales. Camelback will remain part of it.

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Brandon Marsh - Website | @BrandonMarshTX | RokaSports | 1stEndurance | ATC Bikeshop |

Is it me, or is Argon18 adding a ton of athletes. Not really sure what's up, but they now sponsor Heather Jackson and I think the Wattie Ink team as a whole? Erik Lagerstrom is now riding Argon18. Michelle Vesterby is also. Previous to these adds the only Argon 18 riders I followed were the Wassner twins.

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Washed up footy player turned Triathlete.

Interesting they claim it is completely unrelated to the "boycott"