About BMC
About BMC
Brand Story
In the world of premium bike brands, we have spent decades building our sport and pushing technologies to the limits.
The earliest days of BMC saw fast and monumental innovation across the bicycle industry. The late 80’s and early 90’s defined the ambitions of our sport, and BMC was perfectly positioned to make the fastest of those ambitions real.
In the decades since, we’ve led the refinement of many of these advancements, as well as entirely new innovations, all with a common theme of creating speed. This singular focus on speed has led us to become the brand we are today: fast, unrelenting, and iconic.
The BMC team is now over 150 people, and hundreds more supported athletes. We are still based where we began, in Grenchen, Switzerland, though we’ve since added our Impec Lab, and there’s now an Olympic velodrome next door. We’ve won races and titles, defined new categories, and grown into the technological and engineering powerhouse that we always aspired towards. We’re never done, and never satisfied; we will always continue to refine and reassess.
The expertise of our team is what makes this all possible and lays the foundation for our future. We’ll continue to create speed at every opportunity, and as in years past, we can’t wait to show you some of the ideas we’re working on right now.
History
1986 – Bicycle Manufacturing Company’s first licensed RALEIGH bikes.
1994 – The BMC brand is born.
2000 – Andy Rihs chairman of the Phonak Group and the Phonak Cycling Team takes over the company.
2002 - BMC develops the Teammachine for the Phonak Cycling Team to race on.
2003 – BMC goes global, with international exports.
2004 – BMC enters the Tour de France spotlight. The Timemachine TT01 and award-winning Promachine SLC01 are launched.
2005 – BMC celebrates a Tour de France stage win.
2007 – The Fourstroke series is launched, setting BMC’s MTB standard.
2010 – The BMC Impec lab opens. Our Swiss research facility allows our engineering team to innovate & refine new ideas at an unmatched pace.
2011 – Cadel Evans wins the Tour de France, on a BMC, riding for the BMC Racing Team.
2012 – Philippe Gilbert wins the UCI Men’s Elite Road Race World Championship, also on a BMC.
2013 – The new Teammachine SLR01 sets a new performance standard.
2014 – Julien Absalon becomes World XCO MTB Champion, European MTB Champion, UCI MTB World Cup Winner and French MTB National Champion, all on a BMC.
2015 – The BMC Racing Team wins 3 stages of the Tour de France and the UCI Team Time Trial World Championships for a second year running.
2016 – Greg van Avermaet wins the Rio Olympic Road Race on a Teammachine SLR01. The Roadmachine is launched ushering in a new standard of integration and design.
2017 – Greg van Avermaet wins Paris Roubaix, the launch of the Teammachine SLR Disc sets a new benchmark for performance disc brake road bikes.
2018 – Andy Rihs passes away, and after 11 highly successful years, the curtains are drawn on the BMC Racing Team era.
2019 – The URS is launched, disrupting the gravel discipline and reimagining what is possible.
2020 – The Teammachine SLR is revolutionized, raising the performance bar further. Jordan Sarrou wins the UCI MTB XC World Championships on the Fourstroke 01.
2021 – BMC welcomes a new World Tour road team, AG2R Citroen, and women’s cycling icon, Pauline Ferrand Prevot. The team wins a stage in every grand tour, and the Fourstroke wins gold in Tokyo.
Remembering Andy
When Andy Rihs took over BMC Switzerland in 2000, the brand underwent a monumental shift. He spearheaded the movement towards precision engineering, building our carbon production facility from scratch to produce his ideal of the ‘Porsche of race bikes.’ No other cycling manufacturer has that many in-house tools at its disposal and it’s largely thanks to that one man.
Since his passing in 2018, the absence in the cycling industry has been felt acutely. Andy Rihs was not only part-owner and main sponsor of BMC and the BMC Racing Team, but also a friend, an exemplary visionary, and an avid sports fan.
And the legacy lives on.
Our mission remains the same; to design, engineer and create the world's most technologically advanced and iconic bikes.
