Ever been to Nevers? If not, chances are that it’s come to you because Nevers is the capital city of clipless pedals.
The city sits in central France on the bank of the Loire river, bank as in singular as the city is on the northern side and there’s little to the south. It sounds like the town that likes to say “no” but the name comes from “new fort” in Roman times.
Fast forward nearly 2,000 years and an industrialist from Nevers called Jean Beyl had a company making rubber bladders. One winter in the late 1940s he went skiing and broke his foot. Convinced the ski bindings were to blame for the injury he had his eureka moment to make a metal plate on the ski that would rotate in the event of a fall and use elastic bindings to help movement in an accident too.
Beyl wasn’t the first inventor of quick release ski bindings, Norway’s Hjalmar Hvam broke his leg skiing and came up with a similar idea, and earlier too. But he was a competition skiier and Beyl an industrialist with ready capital and labour. So Beyl perfected a quick release ski binding and soon the Look Nevada became the market leader. The English name of Look traded on post-war enthusiasm for all things American. The business flourished during a time when skiing became a mass activity and a growing market.
Only Look went bankrupt in the early 1980s during a period of upheaval in the French economy. Entrepreneur Bernard Tapie bought the firm out of bankruptcy for one franc and part of the turn-around was to enter the cycling market. Ski boots and bindings had plenty in common with cycling shoes and pedals. But most cyclists used small cleats with a grove to hold the shoe on the pedals and secured this with a leather strap. Look wanted to copy the automatique ski bindings to replace this. And just like the ski bindings before, Look didn’t invent clipless pedals, it refined them.
Tapie’s marketing abilities with the La Vie Claire team – then the wonder team seen at the cutting edge of sports science – helped sales soar, Look pedals “won” the 1985 Tour. To this day Look retains the Mondrian-inspired white, red, yellow and blue quadrilaterals branding that were first used for the team and then adopted by Look and also other companies in Tapie’s conglomerate. You can see it on packaging and also the factory walls in Nevers too.
Ousted from Look as a result of the bankruptcy proceedings, Beyl went on to create Time with his son-in-law Rolland Cattin in 1987. The company was also based in Nevers and hit the ground running, Pedro Delgado won the Tour de France in 1988 with Time pedals and shoes, so did Greg Lemond in 1989 Tour, and with white shoes too, ubiquitous today but until 1989 shoes were almost always black, with a few grey or blue options.
Time thrived for a while and Tom Boonen was on a Time frame with Time pedals when he won the Worlds in 2005. But the company lost ground was in financial difficulty with different owners trying to relaunch it. Confusingly Look Cycle was bought out by some of its managers while Time was taken over by ski brand Rossignol which also has the Look ski bindings business. In 2021 Time was bought by SRAM where the Time Sport brand lives on for pedals.
Today there are separate Look factories in Nevers for ski bindings and cycling and while they share a name, they are not the same business. The Look Cycle pedals business has recovered too. In 2021 Look Cycle brought back all some of its activities in Asia to concentrate in production in Nevers and now about 80% of its pedals are made here. It also makes road, gravel, MTB and track frames.
We’ll see who wins in Nevers. Cofidis with their Look bikes and pedals would be ideal for this postcard but today’s preview suggests that’s a tall order. If Biniam Girmay wins it’ll be on Time pedals and so a connection to Nevers. Jasper Philipsen and Tim Merlier use Shimano pedals but there’s actually a Nevers connection as while Shimano has its proprietary SPD cleats, it also has a line of road pedals that are licenced from Look Cycle which use larger, triangular plastic cleats similar to the design used by Look for decades. And while Decathlon-CMA CGM’s Olav Kooij rides a bike with SRAM components, he and his team mates are on Look pedals. Made in Nevers.