About Cannondale

Cannondale is a brand that entered cycling with a bang. With risky designs, not always understood by the more conventional public, but breaking the mould in such a way that it has positioned itself as one of the benchmark manufacturers in terms of high-end bicycles. Cannondale manufactures high-performance bicycles with very clear signs of identity, such as its famous Lefty forks with a single arm in the mountain segment or its preference for carbon as a frame construction material. Their bikes are easily recognisable and leave no one indifferent. You either love them or you want nothing to do with them. This is especially noticeable in the MTB market, where Cannondale has pushed innovation to seemingly impossible limits with its Lefty left-arm forks. This technological innovation makes Cannondale mountain bikes unique.
The search for new designs and technical improvements that defy convention is one of the symbols of this brand that creates in the United States and manufactures in Taiwan. Cannondale was the manufacturer that invented the BB30 bottom bracket system, which was later adopted by other major brands and today is one of the most widespread standards. Cannondale's fat wheels once had risky suspensions for contact, which marked the evolution of the MTB, a suspension that linked the headset to the two-arm fork and was an aesthetic rarity. Also eye-catching were their road and touring bike models with thicker tubes than those used by other manufacturers.
In 1971, when Joe Montgomery created Cannondale, he first thought of making camping gear before making touring bikes. This was not the only time Cannondale thought about a product outside the bicycle. In the 1990s, it made forays into motorbikes, a resounding failure that led to its sale in 2003. The roots of this American-born brand were divided into two locations. The bicycles were designed in Bethel (Connecticut) and built in Bedford (Pennsylvania). In this sense, Cannondale was already committed to innovation by separating the design centres from the manufacturing centres. The arrival of Cannondale in road cycling was not easy, due to the fact that the thickness of the tubes of their bicycles gave them a grotesque aesthetic for the time. Cannondale manufactured very thick parts that were crude for European standards. An evolution that marked their road bike production until aluminium was introduced. But the brand remained confident in its possibilities and entered the competition with Mario Cipollini, the fastest cyclist in the peloton, in the Saeco team, who was constantly adding victories on his red Cannondale. With Cipollini, Cannondale found a gateway to the market. The Italian rider was also a pioneer, being the first rider to wear frames painted in the colour of his jersey.
In the 2004 Giro, Cannondale was the bike used by the two best riders of that edition of the Italian round, Damino Cunego and Gilberto Simoni. The brand had created the lightest bike on the market with a model that weighed less than 6.8 kilograms, a limit that the UCI did not allow to be exceeded. That was when the slogan "Legalize my Cannondale" was born. Cannondale is what is known as a lovemark, a brand that has gone above and beyond, cultivating passion and loyalty among thousands of fans around the world. The variety of bike models it offers today is a far cry from Cannondale's first catalogue, which almost always offered its first bikes in white or red.