Just about everyone knows Decathlon, in fact it’s a pretty safe bet that most people reading this have used one of its products at some point in their lives. The French company, founded in 1976, is the largest sporting goods retailer in the world.
When it comes to cycling, Decathlon has become best known in the UK for its affordable entry-level bikes and kit under the B’Twin and Triban banners. That changed in 2019, however, when Decathlon launched Van Rysel, a brand dedicated to high-end, high-performance bikes and equipment. And so began a journey for its newly established team to establish a premium range of products to compete with brands that in most cases have been in the game for decades longer than Van Rysel, some of them even pre-dating the Tour de France.
Five years later, Van Rysel has introduced the RCR, as used on the WorldTour by the Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale pro team, and it’s safe to say the brand’s introduction to the top level of cycling could hardly have gone any better.
To understand just how and why Van Rysel has been able to rise to the top so quickly, Cyclist visited the team’s headquarters just outside of Lille, where the dream began and the dream continues.
In theory
‘Decathlon was famous for catering to all types of athletes, but the truth is that at some point consumers who were really into road cycling needed to go somewhere else,’ says Maxime Delabre, Van Rysel’s chief marketing officer. ‘We decided we wanted not only to teach them how to ride but to get alongside them until the end of their experience.
‘That is why Van Rysel is here – to address the very demanding cyclist’s interests as well. We want to develop the best-in-class products for each different level: bikes, clothing, accessories, electronics and home trainers covering road, cyclocross, gravel and indoor cycling. That makes us the only global cycling brand covering all these categories.’
A key cog in the Van Rysel machine is Yann Le Fraillec, head of product development, who has been with the brand since the beginning and is the man behind the RCR line.
‘We are not rookies in the bike industry,’ Le Fraillec points out. ‘We’ve been making carbon bikes for over 30 years, and we know how to make carbon frames very well. It’s just that we were away from the high end of the market for a while in terms of aerodynamics and integration. So I thought to myself OK, I need to find a wind-tunnel, I need to find engineers, I need to find a lot of people. Just across the street – you can even see the building from my desk – is a company called Onera, and someone told me that it has a wind-tunnel.
‘I thought it was strange that there was a wind-tunnel 900 metres from my office and I didn’t know, but it turns out Onera works for the army making weapons, rockets, submarines, that kind of stuff. Not bikes, of course, but at least they knew something about aerodynamics.
‘I called them and said I wanted to make a bike with them. They were unsure at first because they normally work with testing at much higher speeds, but they agreed to help. It turned out to be a hugely popular project that many of the guys on the Onera team wanted to work on because of how passionate they are about bikes. So when we were developing the RCR we 3D printed ten iterations of the bike, walked them across the street, along with some of our competitors’ bikes, and took them straight into the wind-tunnel.
‘The results were unbelievably good. From there we selected one of the designs, worked to refine the weight, stiffness and address any mechanical issues, and that’s the story of the Van Rysel RCR.’
Onera wasn’t the only outside collaborator Van Rysel enlisted. From the start, Le Fraillec was open to working with other brands within cycling and took on partnerships with Deda to produce the RCR’s cockpit and SwissSide for its wheels, relationships that will continue for future projects. In fact, Le Fraillec reveals there are eight new racing and endurance bikes due in the next two years spanning both road and gravel.
Taking on the world
‘When it comes to pro racing, we are always working in the same way and that’s using data; we’re really a data-driven brand,’ Le Fraillec says. ‘Some people will love us, some people will hate us, perhaps because they are afraid or because they don’t like the name. But in the end we trust that we have done something specific, and something special. That’s what motivates me and the team. When we say we’ll design a racing bike, it’s to win a race.’
So how do you make a WorldTour bike? The Van Rysel team comprises 60 people working at the brand’s main office, further staff members in commercial roles outside of France, as well as the greater ranks of staff working across development and production in the factory at the company’s B’Twin Village headquarters. Situated just outside Lille in northeast France – Van Rysel being Flemish for ‘from Lille’ – the facility is a hub of activity dedicated to a wide spectrum of sports, and comprising both public and private spaces. It’s home to several laboratories that help dream up, create, test and refine a huge range of products, and it’s home to Van Rysel’s production line too.
Among the labs that play a part in Van Rysel’s story is the ideas hub, known as Booster Inno, where creative minds are allowed to roam free to dream up concepts for all kinds of products, ranging from wrapper-free energy gels to portable badminton nets.
Next there’s API, a prototype-creation lab where Booster workers are able to produce physical recreations of their ideas, albeit invariably using more basic materials than the final products will have.
Another area that plays a pivotal part in Van Rysel’s development process is the AddLab, a 3D printing department that produces models for wind-tunnel testing and custom or one-off parts at short notice.
The AddLab team played a part in Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale rider Ben O’Connor’s Giro d’Italia time-trial setup, for instance, as did the SportsLab, which focusses on the human body and is equipped with a body scanner that creates a virtual replica of the rider, allowing designs and testing to be done without the individual being present – handy for an international cycling team. It also contains chambers to recreate weather conditions, useful for testing how much sweat a jersey soaks up, for instance, or how warm a glove is.
Finally there’s Tech’Off, a huge department that puts every important detail of an enormous range of products to the test. In Van Rysel’s case that includes testing on helmets as well as important fatigue and stress testing of bike frames and components, with machines running constantly to replicate and surpass each product’s outdoor lifecycle.
The team at B’Twin Village is massive, and the levels of creativity, expertise and precision are the very highest, with no stone left unturned in the quest for the best products. That even extends to scaling up a kids’ bike to an adult size so the team can actually test the product themselves and provide constructive design feedback.
That takes us into the factory, where Van Rysel’s bikes – and all those under the wider Decathlon cycling umbrella, which includes mountain bikes, e-bikes, cargo bikes and even local hire bikes – are fully assembled and checked. In the centre of the room is a revolving rail where each day workers build bikes up from frame to finished product, assembling and checking the necessary parts. Staff are hired through community support programmes and go through rigorous training before being allowed near the assembly line.
When something isn’t quite right, the bike is pulled from the line and the problem identified and addressed, with the build then finished at a standalone workstand. Bikes are then packaged and stored in the distribution centre next door before being shipped out worldwide.
Fit for the pros
Given the lengths involved in making sure every Van Rysel product is up to the required standard of quality, the fact that it provides equipment for use at the sharp end of the WorldTour peloton, having only launched in 2019, is truly remarkable. But that was the deadline that was set.
‘We visited two or three teams before committing to providing bikes to the WorldTour,’ Le Fraillec says. ‘It wasn’t the warmest reception when we said, “We are Van Rysel, we are a new brand, do you want to ride our bike? It’s just 3D now but you’ll be able to ride it six months before the new season.” But we showed them the data and within 5km of testing the bike in Spain, the AG2R La Mondiale riders were convinced.’
Counting the cost
Part of Decathlon’s success has been built on providing excellent value for money, so it’s no surprise that the flagship Van Rysel RCR Pro’s £9,000 pricetag significantly undercuts its direct competitors. So how come is it so cheap?
‘It’s not cheap,’ Le Fraillec argues. ‘But it is a good price, and we achieve that because we have a very good business model. We produce all the products a rider needs, so we don’t only depend on the bike to make a profit. That way we can propose a fair price, not a cheap price but a fair price, for each product category.’
While the Decathlon name has come to be associated with the more accessible side of the market – and still is with the Van Rysel RCR, depending on how you define ‘accessibility’ – it really should be just as well known for its commitment to passion, dedication and quality. It can afford to be ‘accessible’ because of a successful business model that is built around doing things the right way, with no corners cut and no avenues left unexplored in pursuit of the goal.
As part of that family, Van Rysel is no different. In this instance, though, the goal is winning, and there’s no doubt that Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale and their Van Rysel RCR Pro bikes are doing just that.
