What Colnago is known for

Bicycle marque founded in 1954 in Cambiago, near Milan, by Ernesto Colnago, who pioneered cold-bent fork tubes in 1956; its frames carried Eddy Merckx through Tour de France, Giro and World Championship wins from the early 1970s.

Colnago began in 1954, when Ernesto Colnago opened a small shop at Via Garibaldi 10 in Cambiago, north of Milan. Colnago had been working at Milan's Gloria bicycle factory but, after a cycling-training accident forced him to work from home, he started building wheels and assembling rims, hubs and sprockets on his own. In 1956 he changed fork manufacturing by cold-bending fork tubes - clamping and levering the metal between two pieces of wood on his workbench rather than heating it first. The company's reputation went global through its early-1970s partnership with Eddy Merckx and the Molteni professional team; riding Colnago steel, Merckx won five Tour de France titles, five Giri d'Italia, and three World Championships, and used a sub-6kg Colnago for his hour-record ride. Colnago has continued supplying bikes to elite professional racing in the decades since, including more recent riders such as Tadej Pogacar's teams. The company remains based in Cambiago.