This article was produced in collaboration with Canyon and was first published in Issue 139 of our magazine
My bikes have names. They hold memories. When I look at them, they evoke feelings. There is the bike I did my first race on, there is my dream purple frame that I put on every Christmas and birthday list when I was growing up, there is the first bike I had with electronic gears and carbon wheels. When I have to sell one, or give one away, it hurts. Bikes might be inanimate objects, but the ones that mean something to you can have a soul like any living, breathing being does.
From professionals, to amateurs, to commuters, everyone who has a bike can fall in love with it. If we look at those at the very pinnacle of our sport – men’s and women’s WorldTour riders – they have bikes which immortalise their biggest victories. Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney was given a custom yellow Canyon CFR frame when she won the Tour de France Femmes, for example, designed by her husband and artist, Taylor Phinney. Annemiek van Vleuten had a shimmering gold Canyon to commemorate her historic Olympic win in Tokyo. Mathieu van der Poel rode a white Canyon with rainbow accents for his year as world champion.
In the curves and edges of the frames, weaved into the wheels and nestled in the cranks and handlebars, these bikes hold the memories of every pedal stroke, every bead of sweat, every early morning it has taken to get to this point. They are much more than just a sum of their parts.
Ever since its inception in 2002, Canyon says it has been about creating a blend between passion and performance. Founder Roman Arnold started building custom bikes 40 years ago, striving to make athletes’ bikes feel as special as the rides they do on them – whether that is winning a Grand Tour or going out on a spin down local lanes. One thing that Canyon has always understood is that a bike can mean as much to your everyday cyclist as it can to those who are paid to race for a living. Everyone deserves a quality ride. With this in mind, why should a custom bike be reserved solely for the best of the best? With MyCanyon, a new customisation programme introduced by Canyon this year, every rider can have access to a one-of-a-kind build which, most importantly, means something to them.
“Canyon is all about the best possible bike, back in the late-70s our founder Roman Arnold would travel to Italy and find the finest frames, the finest components and bring them back to Germany and sell them at bike races from his big blue trailer,” explains Simon Summerscales, Canyon’s Chief Marketing Officer.
“Roman created Canyon not just as a business opportunity, but for the pure love of bikes. It continues to this day. He wanted to make better bikes for himself, friends and his customers.
“We launched MyCanyon as a chance for collaboration with our customers and for them to feel a much deeper connection to their bike.”
Art Cycle
Valencia-based artist Felipe Pantone grew up painting walls. His canvases were buildings and objects, inspired by the modern world and the noises and speed it moves at. Before being approached by Canyon to design a bike for the MyCanyon customisation programme, the slender lines and thin carbon tubes that create the geometric shapes on a frame were not something that Pantone had considered a base for his art. His MyCanyon design – which the eagle-eyed cycling fans will have spotted Kasia Niewiadoma riding at Omloop het Nieuwsblad earlier this season – is like nothing seen before on a race bike, accentuating the tubing and lines on the Aeroad CFR, Canyon’s history-making aero machine.
“Graffiti was my first touch point with painting in general, you have to be fast when painting on the streets. That was always in my DNA. Same for adaptability, you had to adapt to any surface whether that be a wall, or a train or a bus,” explained Pantone.
“I care about speed and I’ve been trying to evoke that emotion in many of my artworks. If I can print that on to the bike and make it look faster and even more technical, then it adds a component of emotion. You look at the bike and it reminds you of everything the bike can do even if you aren’t riding it. That’s what I am trying to do.”
Bringing Pantone’s design to life with the intricacies and complications of the pattern was no easy feat for Canyon. New techniques and labour-intensive, careful application of paint was a challenge for the German brand, who now sell Pantone’s design for customers who want a hand-painted frame with components customised to their liking.
“I set some clear boundaries of what was possible and what was not feasible but we have really extended those boundaries for this project. There were moments where I was wondering if we could pull it off. Translating this design into a production ready bike took almost ten or 15 times the time that I usually need to finish a bike,” said Lukas Beck, Senior Graphic Designer at Canyon.
“The most crazy part about this bike is the sheer amount of steps and paint layers that we need to achieve this design. We had to cover one part of the bike in the first step, then cover the other part of the blue for the second colour and so on, that was a massive challenge. We had to find creative solutions to avoid double painting areas of the bike to keep the layers down to a minimum. It was all done by hand, it was manual labour that goes into it. It is really complex to achieve this level of detailed design.”
It isn’t just Pantone’s design that has been spotted in the professional peloton in 2025. Mathieu van der Poel also debuted an unmissable frame during Tirreno-Adriatico, designed by world-renowned artist Elena Salmistraro. With bright, bold fingerprints of colour in a kaleidoscopic palette, Salmistraro’s design was a clear contrast to that of Pantone’s, representing the different interpretations each artist has when it comes to the feeling that a bike evokes.
“Art is energy. I wanted my object to give energy to the ambiance. I am a product designer from Milan. The characteristics of my work are freedom, powerful colours, texture everywhere, I want people to look at my project and feel emotions,” said Salmistraro.
“I have a house on the lake and I imagined the bicycle on the road with the reflection of the water and the sun on the surface of the bicycle. With this I imagined the colourful spots and the movement of the wind and the waves. When I looked at the bike for the first time it was incredible, like a miracle.”
It was Beck who brought Salmistraro’s vision to life when she travelled to Canyon’s headquarters in Koblenz: “Elena was a perfect fit [to design a bike for the MyCanyon programme] as she has a very energetic and vibrant style, inspired by everything and she can extract the essence and put it into artwork. I think her design is something so human and organic that you can see her feelings in it,” he explained.
“In the MyCanyon project, I am a sparring partner with the artists for their ideas but I am also the person who makes sure we can make everything possible for the artist. The final bike is probably the most colourful Canyon has ever done.”
Options for all
Pantone and Salmistraro’s bikes form the Opus collection of the MyCanyon customisation programme, and alongside them sit the Mano and Fabrio collections. These one-of-a-kind paint jobs are available to those who want a bike that really stands out from the crowd.
The Mano range currently features the Astro series, whereby each frame is hand-painted using technical processes, and each one is unique. Inspired by the celestial aura of Nebulae – the giant clouds of gas and dust that float between stars – the four design options are bright and bold, some using drizzle paint techniques, others low viscosity paint specks and some with a three-dimensional hand-stamping process. The colour accents and decals in the Mano collection can also be customised to each rider’s liking.
The Fabrio collection is the third in the MyCanyon collections, using iridescent decals that change appearance as the bike reflects light. With the aim of creating artwork that dances on the frame as it moves, Canyon uses special pigments to create a frame coined the ‘Dark Matter’, a Gold Dust frame with a stunning yellow finish, and a Milky Way frame which uses ‘interference’ pigments to appear as multiple different colours at the same time.
It isn’t just in the design of the frame that bikes in the MyCanyon range can be tweaked to the liking of the rider who is purchasing them. Aeroad CFR customers also get to choose between Shimano Dura-Ace and SRAM Red; three different saddles from Selle Italia and two different wheelsets from Zipp and DT Swiss. The latest PACE bar, which comes with the current Aeroad CFR, is width adjustable, has 20mm of height adjustment and comes with replaceable drops, but prior to MyCanyon there was a default stem length that depended on the frame size selected. The launch of MyCanyon addresses that, with stem lengths from 70mm to 140mm available with the Aeroad CFR initially, with more models to follow soon.
Performance is personal
For many, the way in which we ride our bikes is a representation of who we are. Some of us have an attacking style, punching up climbs and sprinting out of corners. Others prefer slower, meandering rides that allow you to look over the hedgerows and enjoy the view. No one bike rider is the same, so why should every bike be? MyCanyon represents the start of a new era for a bike brand which has long been at the forefront of innovation. The Opus, Fabrio and Mano collections merge art and sport in a brave and experimental way – each bike is unique, crafted in a lab from raw carbon with custom paint, finished with best-in-class components and fit precision. They are bikes which are the mouthpiece for their owner’s story, a visual representation of personality and passion, while also being high-performance machines.
As technology evolves along with the world around us, the sport of cycling has changed too. The obsession with power data, heart rate numbers, aerodynamics and marginal gains has, at times, felt like it was in danger of destroying the soul that makes so many people fall in love with riding their bikes. Canyon is a brand which has, of course, been part of this change, pushing forward the cutting edge of bike design in order to remain competitive and at the forefront of high-performance machines. However, with the designs of Pantone and Salmistraro, as well as the launch of the Mano and Fabrio collections, comes a public acceptance that aesthetics and passion mean just as much as how fast a bike tests in a wind tunnel. Those numbers matter, but they aren’t what makes you fall in love with your bike. For that to happen, using it needs to feel special. It needs to make you believe. It needs to make you dream. The era of customisation is here, and we may never go back.
