This article was produced in collaboration with Canyon and was published in Rouleur Issue 137.
Koblenz is a Germanisation of Confluentes, the Latin name of the Roman military post at the confluence of the Rhine and Moselle rivers that was established in 8 BC. It’s also the place where a much newer empire formed out of the flow of ideas from a man called Roman Arnold.
Koblenz is the home of Canyon Bicycles, the global brand that revolutionised the industry with its direct-to-consumer model and which has won Grand Tours, World Championships and Olympic medals. Over 1,500 talented and passionate people work at Canyon’s modern, sprawling headquarters, which are the size of a small village.
But, huge though Roman’s empire undeniably is, it has humble beginnings. His chariot was a battered blue trailer covered in stickers, and his army consisted of just him, his father and his younger brother Franc. While the teenage Roman Arnold raced his bike, his father sold components that they’d brought back from Italy out of the trailer. His father died when he was just 18, and Arnold decided that he would dedicate his life to continuing the business, and he and Franc founded Radsport Arnold, the company that would later become Canyon, in 1985.
Forty years on, Roman Arnold, now 61, is standing in the semi darkness of a garage next to the same trailer. He runs his thumb over the familiar faded Assos sticker on the rear, as if he’s touching a holy relic. Instead of showing us Canyon’s state of the art R&D labs or the new high-tech warehouse that enables customisation of each top-level CFR bike at point of online purchase, Arnold wants to show Rouleur his bike collection. We’re in a quiet, residential neighbourhood in Koblenz in the garage of a detached house that from the outside looks like the sort of place where any family might live. But Arnold bought it especially to convert into a private bike museum, he has painstakingly curated the contents and now it’s ready. We’re starting at the bottom with the trailer, just as he did.
Arnold stepped back as CEO in 2020 to become chairman of Canyon’s advisory board but more recently, as of September 2025, is back with operational responsibilities as executive chairman. He started collecting bikes intensively around 10 years ago when he initially sold 40 per cent of the company to American investors TSG. “They helped us to open up the US business-wise but at the time I thought, what will I do if it doesn’t turn out well for me? So I started to collect Canyon bikes that won something I was personally proud of, so that I would at least still have the memories. I was in Mendrisio when Cadel Evans won our first World Championship in 2009. Unfortunately I was not at Alex Dowsett’s Hour Record in 2015 because I was in hospital. I was in Innsbruck when Alejandro Valverde won in 2018.” Then he added significant bikes from other companies that for him represented innovation, a milestone in technological development, or had been ridden by one of his heroes. “Then later, I realised the whole driver for me to be in this business was the relationship with my father. So I was looking for those first steel bikes.”
The location – an ordinary house on an ordinary street – is also something Arnold has considered carefully. “If you plan to do a small museum for your bikes it’s a big project if you want to do it well. You could make a much bigger one for the same amount of money but this wasn’t the aim. The aim was that the bikes that I love should be in the right environment, and the right environment for me should be more or less like when we started the business when I was a kid. We started at home. It’s a little bit of nostalgia for the past – and the other thing that’s important is that it has a garage.”
The original garage at the family home in Löf, a village just outside Koblenz, was where the fittings and custom builds happened in the earliest days of Radsport Arnold. The blue trailer would be stuffed full of the latest Italian components brought back from places like Cesenatico, where the family holidayed, and dream bikes built in the garage. This is how the direct-to-consumer model began, says Arnold. He himself was racing, he knew his customers personally because he raced with them, and he knew what they wanted.
However, one of the first things Arnold wants to show us right at the beginning of our guided tour is not Italian. We make our way past a row of radical 1990s lo-pros with sloping top tubes and disc wheels, including a Banesto Pinarello that belonged to the late climber José María Jiménez, and stop in front of an older blue and gold Koga Miyata road bike equipped with Shimano Dura-Ace AX. “This is very important for the history of modern components,” he says. “The Du - ra-Ace AX groupset came out around 1980 and everything was aero, even the pedals, the brakes. Later Campagnolo reacted with the Delta brakes. But this group was too aggressive for the time and the fitting was not quite right for Italian frames. From my point of view, this really put Shimano on the landscape. At the beginning Shimano tried to do good Campagnolo groups, but this was so advanced.” Of course Arnold has an example of the Campagnolo 50th anniversary groupset from 1983 for comparison. This was the limited gold-accented edition that was presented to Pope John Paul II at the Vatican. “It’s nice. It’s really well made, but if you see the Shimano groupset there’s a big difference. I would say from there, even if the AX groupset wasn’t that successful, the rise of Shimano had begun.” It’s clear that the artisan way, beloved by the Italians, whereby the framebuilding tradition and the skills were passed from father to son or master to apprentice, held no appeal for Arnold. Had he ever built a steel frame? “Yes, when I finished my education I had to build a frame. I don’t have it any more – I sold it because we needed money at the time,” he says unsentimentally. But I was interested in the new materials.”
The journey from selling steel Italian bikes to producing his own carbon-fibre bikes was far from straightforward, however. Upstairs in a room dedicated to mountain bikes, Arnold points to a nude carbon full-suspension bike with an unfamiliar early Canyon logo. “This was an important bike for us because we had a big recall on it. I’m not afraid to talk about it because we learned a lot. It shaped the company.” He begins: “We started in the mountain bike boom to make our own bikes. In the beginning the hardtails were not too special – the right geometry, the right parts... As a bicycle dealer we were in close contact, so we knew what the customer wanted. Then it got more complicated when full suspension and then carbon came along.
“We already had a testing machine where we could test side load, but we didn’t have one where we could test the maximum load from the top,” he explains. “And the bike broke in this area [at a suspension anchor point]. The recall was only about 100 bikes, but it was huge for us because it looked as though we didn’t know enough about this new material, carbon fibre. So I had to learn about it.” At the time, Toray and Toho were the two companies who manufactured the fibre, and Arnold saw that one of the two had a subsidiary in western Germany. “So I went there and asked if I could learn about their product. Because they only sold the yarn they couldn’t help, but they said there’s a great university not so far from you, an IVW [Institut für Verbundwerkstoffe - composites] in Kaiserslautern. So I went there and said, ‘I want to make the best road bike in the world.’ They asked for 200,000 euros upfront and with that they could get a European-funded project from the university and maybe get another 500,000 from the European Commission. The professor put a guy called Michael Kaiser in charge of my project. When he finished there with his doctorate I said, Michael, I want to hire you as the lead of our bicycle development department. The professor told him, Michael, don’t go there. He had an offer from Airbus and an offer from Honda, which is pretty close in Köln. But in the end he came to us and he was engineer number one. This was, I think, 1997. Today our whole development group is around 150 people and Michael still works in the company. So we did it really in a very structured way. You could say this was also the time when the Italian bike industry was struggling a little, companies were beginning to check out. Before it was craftsmanship to make the nicest steel frames. But now this was science.”
Across the hallway, we’re back in the world of road bikes, and Arnold points to a round-tubed white and green model with the name of Rigoberto Urán on the top tube. “This was the first carbon-fibre Canyon pro road race bike and we sponsored Unibet in 2007,” he says. “We were supposed to go to the Tour de France that year but we didn’t, because French law prohibited advertising for foreign-owned gambling companies. After three races we were not allowed to start the Tour of Flanders.”
However, the Canyon genie was out of the bottle. “The German magazine Tour, who like to measure everything, suddenly declared that this was the best bike in the world. And at a price of 35 or 40 per cent less than the competition. This was very difficult in the beginning to understand. The readers wrote to the magazine to ask how it could be better than a Colnago.”
How was the price so much lower? “The same as today,” he answers. “Because we sell directly to the consumer. This is how we started our business in the garage. The frames are made in our own moulds, then we ship it without going through any dealer. If you look at the big companies there’s not only a dealer in between but also the European distribution, several layers. But I knew what our customers wanted because we had been our own customers.” He continues: “I think a road bike is the wrong product for a dealer. Why? We have seven sizes and different component options. As a dealer you always have the wrong bike in stock. I also think personally that if you have good geometry and enough sizes you don’t need a custom bike. There was a time in the 1980s when everybody wanted made-to-measure but sometimes it changed the geometry and the bike did not ride well. But what we can do because of our deep knowledge is get a bike that will fit you 95 per cent. Then if you want to do the last five per cent you can go to a fitter and change the contact points.”
Additionally, with the launch of MyCanyon earlier this year, starting with the Aeroad CFR, customers have more fitting options including cockpit dimensions, and this is to be rolled out to other models in the future. Arnold concludes: “Sometimes for customers it’s difficult to understand that the cheaper product is better. It has nothing to do with the quality – it’s all in the way we distribute our bikes.”
In an adjacent room there are one-off innovations by Canyon. Particularly astonishing is a 3.7kg bike made especially for Eurobike in 2004. “Every time we went to Eurobike we wanted to show some- thing beyond the normal things,” says Arnold. It was a standard production frame weighing about 800 grammes but it was equipped with some very trick custom components, he says. “We were working with Hans-Christian Smolik. He was the inventor of shifters in the brake levers, years before Shimano STIs, but no one wanted it because it was too advanced.”
For 2005 Canyon brought a 6.8kg bike with disc brakes with a difference. “Before disc brakes came to road bikes we thought a road bike should have two smaller discs in the front. It was important that the fork gives you a little comfort and so that’s why we thought it should be two. Smolik constructed it in his own way. A year later we did our first Speedmax, which had an integrated water tank in the handlebar.”
In the same room is a 2007 mountain bike with a three-speed internal hub gear and a standard cassette. In other words, a three-speed Classified hub but almost 20 years earlier. “Smolik was also very interested in hub gears,” says Arnold. He was part of that development of the Rohloff hub and was very good friends with Mr Rohloff. So together with Michael Adomeit, who is still with Canyon today, we developed our own internal gear hub. Compared to the others this was a huge project. We wanted to do it but we didn’t find a company to put it into mass production for us. First of all we went to Rohloff, Rohloff said, hmm, this might be competition for us. We talked with SRAM but they had different ideas and this wasn’t a priority for them and then we gave up. This was 2007. I think the Classified hub is a great product. I’m not the guy who says, ‘Oh, they copied something we already did,’ I think, ‘Oh, they have a similar idea.’ I like things that make the sport better.”
In an upstairs room with a view out onto a peaceful mature garden, a Faema team bike belonging to Eddy Merckx from 1969 stands next to a jukebox, which swings into action with a mellow bassy tone as it selects and drops a single onto the turntable behind glass. “When my father passed away my uncle came, so I didn’t go to university,” Arnold explains. “In Germany there’s a system where you go three days to school and the rest you’re in the company for three years. My uncle had an import-export business. Slot machines and jukeboxes. So later we put a jukebox in our garage because I was working there. It was exactly the same as this one.”
Above Merckx’s bike is a collage of frames containing faded photos: “After my father passed away there were two guys in Germany who helped me a lot: Willi Altig, Rudi’s brother – he is 90 years old now and was a good friend of my father. Then this is Kurt Fender, who was a mechanic for the German national team and for the Six Days. I was educated in sales, import-export and then did an Ausbildung [apprenticeship] at his shop as a bike mechanic.”
Many of the rooms have audio, songs and soundtracks matching the era. “What you hear now is the World Championships in 1978 which was close to here, where Francesco Moser was second but the Italians thought he won [he was beaten in a photo finish by Gerrie Knetemann]. The big German guy was Didi Thurau, it was raining all day, a long day. I was there watching with my father and this is a good memory.”
In the middle of the house is a room with the latest Canyon bikes that have been ridden to victories more recently. There’s Mathieu van der Poel’s Paris-Roubaix bike, Nils Politt, Philippe Gilbert and Alejandro Valverde are represented, and there are the green and yellow Aeroad CFRs of Jasper Philipsen and Kasia Niewiadoma respectively. This is also where the 2009 Worlds-winning bike of Cadel Evans lives, along with Alex Dowsett’s 2015 Hour Record bike. However, still conspicuous by its absence is a yellow Canyon of the overall winner of the men’s Tour de France. “We are working on it,” says Arnold with a mock grimace. “I will not retire before we win it.”
He is still closely involved with Canyon’s sponsored pros, he says, and emphasises the importance of the right type of communication with them. “I know Mathieu van der Poel very well. We text sometimes, I go to the races. We have to understand them but also give them freedom. I try to treat them like normal people. If you are good with them, reliable, deliver what you promise, then that builds a good relationship. I still have a good relationship with Nairo Quintana, Philippe Gilbert, also Chloé Dygert... Mathieu came to my house to sign his contract. We used to watch him at cyclo-cross with my children – they have grown up with these riders.”
Does Arnold relate to Van der Poel on a professional level? Are they driven by the same thing? “When I look at Van der Poel, it doesn’t look tough to him. He is not afraid. He has a lot of pressure, but it’s how he takes the pressure. He’s not hesitant. He has a style. But what we have in common is that to be a great bike rider or build a great company you have to dedicate your life to it. It’s not fun every day. Sometimes you have to go out in the rain for 200 kilometres. You know what you have to do. But we love it, we understand it, we absorb it... It’s the same business.”
On our way up the next flight of stairs we pass Graeme Obree’s Old Faithful on a small landing. “I’ve never met him but I would love to. This bike is not his – it’s the original one from the 2006 film [The Flying Scotsman starring Jonny Lee Miller]. This guy is a symbol of thinking differently and this is why I like him so much. Next to it, or rather towering over it, is Francesco Moser’s 1988 indoor Hour Record bike with its enormous rear disc wheel. “I also like Moser – he pushed boundaries and he also used the Obree position for his veterans’ Hour Record in 1994. Even though he was 43, he did a good distance [51.84 kilometres].”
And then, fittingly at the top of the house, we arrive in what Arnold calls the ‘champions’ room’. The first bike we see is a hot rod-flamed monocoque that bike de- signer Mike Burrows conceived for Abraham Olano to attack the Hour Record in 1999 – the last monocoque Burrows did. Ironically Olano never rode it. Arnold points to the completely enclosed drive-train and tells us the cranks are 160mm. “He knew about short cranks.” Behind it is Greg LeMond’s red Bottecchia TT bike, complete with race number 141, famous for winning the 1989 Tour de France by eight seconds. “It’s the spare bike,” says Arnold modestly.
Along the edges of this large room, with the light streaming in, are the time trial bikes of virtually every luminary of modern professional cycling. Fignon’s Raleigh is there, Indurain’s Espada is there, then the later Collinelliera ‘step through’ ver- sion ridden by Bjarne Riis, plus Jan Ullrich’s pink Telekom FES. Chris Boardman’s Lotus 110 stands in the centre, there’s the iconic yellow ONCE Look TT bike with titanium fairings ridden to the 1996 world title by Alex Zülle (Arnold particularly admires this one)... and the Discovery Channel Trek TTX of Lance Armstrong. “I don’t know Armstrong personally but I remember clearly when we were at the beginning of sponsoring the Lotto team in 2009,” says Arnold. “The guy who should have won the Tour de France was Cadel Evans, but that year he wasn’t capable and the mood in the team was quite strange. When you come as an outsider to the team you can instantly sense the atmosphere. At the same time I saw how Armstrong came out of the bus, high-fived his team-mates and had a totally different aura. Even though I didn’t know him, you could see he was something special.” Armstrong’s former team-mate Vyatcheslav Ekimov helped Arnold to acquire the bike. “When you speak to the guys from that time they all still look up to him. I think it’s not okay what happened, but at the same time it is what happens in our industry and we have to deal with it.
“The idea of the champions room is you can change it for a theme. Maybe I have 50 or 60 bikes on display here but the full collection is about 300. I have a lot of early triathlon bikes, the complete Trimble bikes [the engineer behind Kestrel, of whom Arnold is a big fan]. “You can look at the journey of materials. What was the journey from steel, aluminium, titanium, magnesium a bit, to carbon fibre? Even if you want to show the whole history of carbon fibre. You can educate people, educate the young engineers in the company maybe.”
Are there any bikes Arnold is still looking for? “You have to make sure not to collect too many. Sometimes I really ask mself – do I want this particular bike because I have a connection with it, or is it just to show off? And I try not to show off. Why do I have the Anquetil or Coppi bike? When I started they were still big heroes and in their time the Tour de France was a huge adventure. It appeals to me that it was so unpredictable. You dig into Fausto Coppi and realise that he was fascinating not only on the bike but also off it. “There are two or three more bikes that I might be interested in. The really iconic bike is the Lotus 108; I would also like one or two bikes from when Smolik worked with the framebuilder Heinz-Günter Sat- tler, whose brand was Technobull. In the 1980s he was trying to make a bike under five kilogrammes. But I would say there’s no bike I need to have.” He concludes: ”I think it’s important to find my place in this bicycle world. A place in changing times where no matter what happens I know that the bikes and what they mean to me are still there. It’s like jewellery and this house is the box. Even if you don’t wear the jewellery every day it’s still there.”
