Win a Van Rysel RCR Pro bike, as ridden by Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale at the Tour de France

It’s hard not to get inspired by the Tour de France. It’s the pinnacle of our sport. It’s beautiful, cruel, magnificent, and year after year, it serves up an ever more rapidly advancing arms race of the hottest bike tech on the planet.

The pros we all idolise get the best of the best, the real cream of the crop, but that doesn’t mean we mere mortals have to just stand by and watch. Today, Van Rysel, the bike sponsor of French superteam and star of Netflix’s Tour de France Unchained, Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale, is launching a competition where you can win a top-tier RCR Pro Team Edition bike, complete with Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 and Swiss Side Hadron² carbon wheels.

Van Rysel and the heart of cycling

If we are all in agreement that the spiritual home of cycling is France (despite not producing a Tour-winning rider since the mid-80s, but don’t bring that up), then the spiritual home of cycling in France has to be the northeast corner.

Lille is a gritty city, home to Van Rysel, and on the doorstep of the mythical Roubaix velodrome, and within striking distance of the fabled cobbles of the Hell of the North and the savage bergs of the Tour of Flanders. In fact, Van Rysel means ‘from Lille’ in Flemish.

Since 2019, Van Rysel has been based in Lille and has had a focus on producing high-quality, high-performance race machines with a value proposition that cannot be matched by the established players.

Its bikes have been iterated and fettled endlessly in the wind tunnel to produce WorldTour performance machines that are now used by the riders of the premier French cycling team, Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale.

Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale

Cycling sponsors come and go, but Van Rysel is committed to providing competitive high performance bikes for the Decathlon-AG2R squad for the long term. The team has been at the forefront of French cycling since 1992, with big names like Romain Bardet, Pierre Latour, and Domenico Pozzovivo coming up through the ranks.

Now the team fosters the next generation of talent, with the likes of the Austrian climber Felix Gall, and the next great French hope Paul Seixas. You would be forgiven for thinking a team founded in the heart of the Spring Classics would be focused solely on victory in those cold, hard, rainy one-day races, but with a roster of 30 riders, they mix it with the very best on any terrain whenever they pin their numbers on.

The Van Rysel RCR Pro: An all-time all-rounder

In the past, riders would have a single race bike, and in more recent history, the cycling industry has offered up a multi-bike solution to performance, with superlight climbing bikes for the climbers, and chunky and fast, but often harsh aero bikes for the sprinters.

Fortunately for us all, the general consensus is that the best option is a perfectly balanced all-round race machine that’s light enough to handle any climb, but aero enough to not hold you back whether you’re launching for a sprint in a stage at the Tour, trying to beat your friends in the town sign sprint, or simply getting that PB on Strava.

Van Rysel’s RCR Pro is the quintessential all-rounder. Advances in carbon fibre layup combined with the use of super high modulus fibres produce a frameset that weighs in at only 1.7lbs (size medium), without sacrificing pedalling stiffness for maximum power transfer, which is more than a match for the likes of more mainstream brands. Kitted out with Shimano’s flagship Dura-Ace groupset and Swiss Side’s meticulously engineered Swiss carbon wheels and you get a complete bike that tips the scales at a feathery 15.23lbs in a size medium; if it were only a little lighter, it would be illegal for use in UCI races!

Weight is one thing, and there’s no doubt that the RCR Pro can go toe to toe with any climbing bike, but in order to be fast everywhere, it also has to be aerodynamic too, which is why Van Rysel optimized the frame and forks first using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) before prototyping and wind tunnel testing to ensure it can stay competitive at the speed of the professional peloton.

Unmatched value

When it was launched, the Van Rysel RCR Pro caused quite a stir. Not only was it a huge leap in performance for the brand, with the bike racking up an impressive catalogue of positive reviews from countless media outlets, it also maintained the brand’s core focus on giving customers real value for money.

In fact, there isn’t a professional-level bike on the market today that matches the RCR Pro in terms of price. The Team Edition is the same bike the Decathlon-AG2R La Mondiale squad use, even down to the use of Continental’s Aero111 aerodynamic front tyre, and yet the SRP is a few hundred bucks under $12,000, undercutting some brands by thousands: there’s a reason you’re seeing these on your Instagram feed and at the café stop more regularly.

This value trickles down the whole range, but if you’re feeling lucky, you could win a pro replica just by answering one question.

Competition

If you want to win a Van Rysel RCR Pro and be the envy of your clubmates, all you have to do is answer the multiple-choice question at the following link.

Enter here to win a Van Rysel RCR Pro worth $11,599 – the ultimate speed machine!

The winner will be picked at random. No purchase necessary. Open to U.S. residents 18+. One entry per person. Contest ends 11:59 pm PDT on August 3rd. Full terms and conditions apply.