GOLDEN AMBITION: CHLOÉ DYGERT AND CANYON'S FIVE-YEAR QUEST FOR OLYMPIC VELODROME VICTORY

At 19:01 on 7 August 2024 at the Vélodrome National de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines in Paris, Chloé Dygert began her victory lap around the track with a beaming smile on her face and a body full of pain and lactic acid, amidst stars and stripes flags fluttering in the stands. She was finally an Olympic champion on the track, achieving an ambition that began in childhood but one that started to become a reality with her bike sponsor Canyon five years before.

Just four minutes earlier Dygert, together with fellow American athletes Jennifer Valente, Lily Williams and 2024 road gold medallist Kristen Faulkner, began their 4km Team Pursuit event, facing off against a New Zealand team who’d bettered them time and again in previous meets. This time it would be the US team crossing the line first after 4 minutes and 4 seconds in a race that’s frequently separated by decimal places. In this case it was about 0.5 seconds before their Kiwi opponents.

How did that winning margin materialise? Unlike long road cycling races where external variables like punctures, feeding strategies or just pure bad luck can play a part, there’s very little to separate the world’s best track cyclists. They’re typically track specialists, trained to the peak of their physical abilities, so often its down to their equipment manufacturers to come up with wind-cheating products to minimise drag and increase the ability of the riders to cut through the air with the least amount of turbulence. The Canyon Speedmax Track CFR bikes that Dygert, Valente, Williams and Faulkner were riding did just that, but there’s one rider in particular who was central to the development.

Speaking to us from her home in Indiana, Chloé Dygert explains how the story began:

“Growing up in sports I always had my heart set on Olympic Gold. World Championship Gold is amazing but the Olympics just have a bigger reach. When I heard that Canyon wanted to sign me in early 2020 I realised that this was my chance. At the time I was on the Twenty20 Pro Cycling team, which was pretty famous in the US as a development team. I was excited about stepping up but my one main condition on signing for Canyon was that they built a bike for me that was capable of winning Olympic gold on the track. I remember speaking to Canyon’s founder and then-CEO Roman Arnold and he promised it would happen. But at that time I didn’t realise what was going to happen a few months later.”

On September 24, 2020 Dygert suffered a horror crash in the UCI Time Trial World Championships, crashing into a guardrail during the race, lacerating her hamstring and cutting through about 80% of her quadricep muscle.

True to their word though, Canyon signed Chloé to their CANYON//SRAM Racing team and set to work, building a research and development team to piece together a carbon fibre frame stiff enough for the violent accelerations on the track, and skinny enough to be an aerodynamic arrow, the pinnacle of aerodynamic engineering. This is indicative of the development work that takes place in Canyon’s Factory Racing (CFR) programme and it was the start of a deep relationship between Canyon, Chloé and her team.

They set up a partnership with aerodynamic specialists Swiss Side to simulate bike performance in specific races and left no stone unturned in the development of a bike capable of winning gold.

But first there was the small matter of Chloé beginning the long road to recovery, first learning to walk again, and then learning how to block out the pain of rehabilitation to return to riding at the highest level. For obvious reasons 2021 and 2022 were somewhat fallow years considering Chloé’s incredible palmarès, but by 2023 she was back to posting world-beating times and dominating road races again. Luckily that coincided with the development of Canyon’s track bike.

“It 3 years, 442 supercomputer runs, 312 wind tunnel analyses, and 155 hours of track testing time until we settled on the final CFR design” according to Canyon’s lead engineer Lukas Schuchnigg, a man who, by definition, needs to be obsessed with numbers and the finest of margins.

Canyon released their Speedmax CFR Track bike ahead of the UCI World Championships in Glasgow in 2023. It was the fastest bike the German marque had ever produced, not to mention the most expensive, at a price of almost 20,000 EUR.

To the untrained eye it’s a peculiar looking bike. The frame’s tubes are all deep and narrow, acting as fairings against wind drag, and it’s incredibly short, with the rear wheel cutting into the deep seat tube. It’s also narrower than a regular bike with extra-narrow wheel hubs as the central point to two double disc wheels. Gone are traditional handlebars, replaced with a base bar for sprinting leverage, plus arm rests with extension bars customised per rider. And of course, like all track bikes it has no brakes and only one gear, albeit a massive one. You would not want to ride this bike outside. And not many are able to ride it inside due to the intimidating nature of most velodrome bankings.

Schuchnigg tells me that they tested with Chloé and the Danish Men’s Track team with months of feedback directly feeding into the bike’s meticulous evolution. “We took a rider-first approach, asking the riders what they needed and adapting the design process to meet their wishes.” 

The bike broke cover in August 2023, winning two gold medals at the World Championships, with Chloé in particular winning gold in the Individual Pursuit. “That was a good day,” says Schuchnigg. “Years of work validated in one victorious evening.” The road to Paris 2024 was looking good for both Chloé and Canyon.

The bike itself now sits at the pinnacle of Canyon’s very high-end CFR series. This is the area of the company dedicated to the naked ambition to build bikes to win races. It’s the cutting-edge design and best of the best components that any customer is able to buy, but in reality very few will use to their full potential.

Often the technologies developed in one area complement another, or they end up trickling down to more affordable models in the brand’s portfolio, ones better suited to regular cyclists. While there is no trickle down effect for track bikes – currently Canyon only has the one aforementioned 20k EUR version – there is plenty of crossover to other areas, especially road cycling.

“We learnt an awful lot about carbon fibre construction during this process” continues Schuchnigg, “where to add strength and stiffness for performance benefits, and where we could remove or sculpt material without having a negative impact.” Knowledge that no doubt contributed to Canyon’s new Aeroad CFR bikes, which recently won 3 stages of the men’s Tour de France and the overall women’s Tour de France Femmes.

So back to Paris 2024. Canyon’s two medal prospects in the Team Pursuit were Danish men’s team and the American women’s team, both riding the Speedmax Track CFR. Whilst the Danish men’s team posted one of the fastest qualifying times, their final didn’t go to plan riding two seconds slower, forcing them to settle for fourth place – athletes are human sometimes.

Step up Dygert, Faulkner, Valente and Williams. The initial Qualifying round saw the US team off to a great start, breezing through in 2nd place. They then won their first-round heat against Great Britain, going 0.6 seconds faster and posting the fastest time in the heat to put them into the final.

Game time. Up against New Zealand they managed to shave off another 0.3 seconds to record Team USA’s winning time of 4:04.306, only a millisecond slower than the current world record but almost 4 seconds faster than their bronze-medal winning time in 2020, showing the progress made both by the athletes and their bikes.

With the nation celebrating an incredible comeback for Dygert, who still regularly finishes rides in agony due to complications from her injury, perhaps the final word needs to go to the man who made the dream a reality. Canyon’s Roman Arnold: “Since I started my bike company my dream was to build the fastest bikes in the world and to inspire people across the world with winning performances. Finally, with Chloé, we’ve achieved another huge milestone. I hope her grit, determination and resilience is an inspiration to cyclists across the world.”

For more on Canyon's Speedmax Track bike, see Canyon.com.