Bikes used by Tour de France winner and Canadian triathlon silver medalist

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• Historic Fort York David Spittal courtesy murmur.com
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It’s been quite a ride this summer for Phil White.

The North Toronto Collegiate Institute grad is co-owner of a Liberty Village-based bike design and manufacturing company called Cervelo that has been front and centre in a couple of the world’s most prestigious sports events – the Beijing Olympics and the Tour de France.

At the Olympic Games, Cervelo bikes are being used by an estimated 40 riders, White said.

“That’s a big jump from the number we had last Olympics for sure,” he said in a phone interview.

That includes the entire Canadian triathlon team, including Simon Whitfield, who won a silver medal Monday morning in Beijing.

“I think he’s poised for a real resurgence,” said White prophetically speaking to insidetoronto.com prior to Whitfield’s big race. “I’m looking forward to a great performance by Simon.”

Off hand, he said some other Olympic podium hopefuls on Cervelo bikes would include “the Danish national track team, they’ve been probably No. 2 in the world this year.

“There’s some really good riders from Spain, Poland – the Polish track team is doing really well.”

At last month’s Tour de France, Cervelo was only used by the CSC (Computer Sciences Corporation) team, but what a team it was, winning their second team title. They also won in 2003, the first year they started using Cervelo bikes. In between, the team has never failed to produce a podium finish.

But this year the team managed the coup de grace with team member Carlos Sastre winning the Tour de France aboard a Cervélo bike.

Officially, it’s the first time the tour has been won with a Canadian bike.

White was not only there to witness it, but so was most of his Liberty Village staff.

“It was a skeleton staff we left here,” White said.

They were on hand to watch Sastre win the 17th stage (of 21) at Alpe d’Huez, and then most went to Paris to witness the wrap-up.

“I couldn’t have scripted it better if we tried; to win at Alpe d’Huez, and then sitting on the finish line in Paris, that was pretty sweet,” White said.

Needless to say, the Tour de France and now the Olympic Games has generated priceless exposure.

“We did notice immediately,” White said. “Even when we were still in Paris, I got a text message from one of our distributors, saying ‘Hey, ship more bikes, the phones are ringing off the hook’.”

“I think it’s going to be a bit of a surge this year, which would be great,” he continued.

Not that Cervelo, being the hottest new racing bike on the scene for the last few years, needs any introduction to the world’s elite riders. But it’s certainly a useful tool in attracting the serious amateur.

They would have to be serious as Cervelo is not at all competing with mass manufacturers, rather they’re strictly high performance with their bikes starting at $2,000 and then rising into amounts that could buy a fairly decent used car.

“The neat thing is we built the company on the idea that the pros ride the same equipment as we sell to the general public,” White said.

“Anything we learn from the pros, and make the bike better for them, we immediately turn around and make it better for everybody.”

The bike for Santos, he reiterated, “came off the shelf – it could have gone to Carlos or it could have gone to you or me or someone else that just wanted a bike.”

Success has brought steady growth for the company. White estimated the Liberty Village staff at about 40 with “13 or 14 engineers here in Toronto. ... All the engineering is done here in Toronto.”

The company also now has a presence overseas, where the sport is more popular, with a new head office in Neuchatel, Switzerland. The other company co-founder, Gerard Vroomen, originally from the Netherlands, is now at that location.

“We do all the assembly for North America here (Liberty Village) and we do assembly for Europe out of the Swiss office.”

A third composite-testing facility is also now operating in Southern California.

White grew up in Toronto “basically at Avenue Road, Eglinton Avenue area.”

After attending North Toronto CI, he attended McGill University, where he took engineering, and where he hooked up with Vroomen.

Vroomen took five years of engineering in the Netherlands and had come over to McGill for a nine-month final project to design a trial bike.

After McGill, the two were actually working out of the garage of White’s wife in Ottawa.

And when White’s wife got a job offer in Toronto, the two engineers then set up shop in her Toronto house.

“When we moved out of the house, the first place we moved was over near Laird Avenue – it was just the two of us. And then we needed a bigger facility, we moved, five or six years ago, into Liberty Village.

“We just looked around for a good area, kind of an interesting area with a bit of space. It’s a funky building. It’s a neat area.

“When we moved in it still hadn’t kind of made its big surge and really caught on in popularity but now, of course, it’s a fantastic area and everyone wants to be in the area.”

Fortunately for the two, the business has had the same success as the area they’re in.

“We saw a niche and we had confidence. I mean you start a small business you have to have confidence in yourself even if it’s unrealistic,” White said.

“Our friends tell us now they thought we were complete idiots when we started it. But they were very supportive when we started it and we had to believe that we were eventually going to be successful and we had this belief that making better bikes was going to create a real niche and that’s what customers were looking for, and it turns out we built that whole business on making a better bike for people.

“And they seem to have really responded to that.”

As a high school student at North Toronto CI, White said “it was kind of always, for me, a toss-up between going into engineering or business.”

He recalled he initially filled out all his university applications for business before re-doing them “a month later” for engineering.

“I never really knew what I wanted to do between the two and, of course, now I’m kind of living the good mix between the two so it’s kind of an ideal situation from my standpoint.”

Toronto dealers for Cervelo bikes, he said, include Wheels on Bloor, Enduro Sport, Dukes Cycle and Sporting Life.

Visit www.cervelo.com for details.