In the hard-fought world of Olympic track racing, riders chase every tiny improvement and efficiency in the hopes of earning a tenth, or even a hundredth of a second improvement. Margins are so tight at the top level that seemingly tiny changes can have a significant impact. In Paris, when Canada’s track team takes to the boards at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Velodrome they’ll be armed with one very cool, very custom and very unassuming upgrade from a small Canadian bike brand.
Armed or, rather, their arms will be resting in them. The pursuit team are all kitted out with individually customized riser bars from Hamilton, Ont.’s Framework Bikes.
“Track bikes these days are getting more and more advanced so I felt like we needed to push the limits a little further on our setup,” explains Canadian Olympian Mathias Guillemette. “The stock material on the bikes we use are very adjustable and modular but we reached a point where we do not need the modularity and adjustability anymore.”
Guillemette had an idea of where he wanted to go. But knowing what you want and being able to manufacture something at an Olympic level are different things. He’d followed Jonathan Hornell-Kennedy, a.k.a. Framwork Bikes, on Instagram for a while. Knowing he might have the machining skill to help, Guillemette reached out.
“I think at first he was a little bit confused with my ideas. But he was definitely really interested in the project right away,” Guillemette says.
Little changes make important differences
The idea is simple, in theory. Taking the combination of modular risers and turning it into a solid piece. That might not seem like a big difference to most riders. In the world of track cycling, though, every advantage is a worthwhile one.
“These risers make the connection between the base bar (aka bull horns) and the aerobars. Being fully customized, they help clean up the airflow slightly and provide an unmatched rigidity to our system,” Guillemette explains.
Avery Gervais, Canadian team mechanic for the track squad, expanded on that idea.
“The custom risers that Jonathan created for us offered an aerodynamic advantage that we both validated in the RWDI wind tunnel as well as some on track aerotesting,” Gervais says. “The aluminium construction of the risers is stiffer than the standard riser hardware that we have been using which the riders…
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