In 1976, Raymond Vanstraelen's racing career came to an end. His life in cycling was only beginning.

Most riders, when they stop, step away. Raymond did the opposite. He spent three years studying to become a cycling manager and coach, and in 1979 he opened an academy of his own. He called it Suport.

He didn't build it alone. Alongside him stood Yvan Vanmol, the renowned cycling doctor. From day one, Suport was unlike anything around it. This was no club for putting riders on the road and clicking a stopwatch. It was built around a single, stubborn question, the one that would drive everything Raymond ever did:

That question drew talent. The names that came through Suport read like a roll-call of Belgian cycling's golden age: Erik Vanderaerden, René Martens, Herman Frison, Johan Capiot, Guy Nulens. And it pushed Raymond to the very edge of what the sport thought possible.

With Vanmol, he became the first to bring Polar, the Finnish heart-rate pioneer, to Belgium and Luxembourg. Every athlete in the academy, the cyclists and even a motocross rider, trained with a monitor on the wrist, years before the rest of the sporting world even knew to look.

For their riders, Raymond built something almost no one else in the world was offering: he measured the whole athlete. Not a glance and a guess, but every dimension that mattered: the limbs, the inseam, the torso, the arms, and the knee-over-pedal, the forward reach of the knee that hardly anyone else thought to measure at all. Every number fed a computer model that worked out the one position a rider's body was actually built for. In those days, nobody was doing this.

Beneath it lay pure biomechanics. Crank horizontal, pedal flat, Raymond would watch for the instant the head of the quadriceps fell into a plumb line straight over the pedal axle. That single moment told him almost everything: how far the leg leaned, whether the saddle sat right, whether the stroke would let a rider deliver every watt at exactly the right moment.

And symmetry mattered just as much. Left and right had to mirror each other, exactly. He could read it in the knee, see it in a rider's posture, even hear it in the rhythm of the pedals. Nothing got more of his attention.

This was more than a method. It was a belief and it gave the company its name. Bio, for the science of the body. Racer, for the rider it all served. Bioracer.

Raymond's biomechanical measurement proved itself across the professional peloton and far beyond it. But success, for Raymond, was never a finish line. It was the signal to go looking for the next way to
make a rider better.

He means it. Forty years on, the shoe still lights him up because the same biomechanical thinking that had reshaped a rider's position led him, inevitably, downward, to the foot. The foot is where everything a
rider produces finally reaches the bike. It is also where most of it escapes.

Back then, a cycling shoe was black leather on a black
leather sole. Raymond made his one blue, and built an arch inside it. Every
other sport had figured this out; cycling hadn't. More than 80% of riders
pronate, under load the foot rolls inward and drags the knee with it, and the
arch caught that collapse before it turned into lost power.

In 1989, Bioracer's passion for cycling perfection led to apparel innovation, with Raymond's vision and his wife Annie's masterful craftsmanship leading the way. The revolutionary Isofilm Rain Jacket first conquered the pro peloton through Team Panasonic, before pro team Tonton Tapis-GB chose to ride in full Bioracer apparel by 1991.

From Raymond's garage to our Tessenderlo factory, Bioracer's dedication to excellence propelled us onto the world stage. Our partnership with Belgian Cycling in 1994 sparked immediate glory with Paul Herygers' CX world title. Today, 30+ years and hundreds of medals later, the Belgian Blue symbolizes this unstoppable alliance.

From our cutting-edge ProtoLab, where we develop tomorrow's innovations, to our precision facilities in Europe and Colombia, we craft the future of speedwear. Supporting historic achievements like Ganna's World Hour Record, Evenepoel's Olympic double, and Kopecky's back-to-back rainbow stripes, we strive to bring the same championship-winning innovation to every cyclist's wardrobe.