From:
Bike.com - Sunday, January 21, 2001
It’s an old cliché among cyclists: We don’t ride hundreds of miles every week because it’s fun or because it keeps us healthy or because we like the scenery. We ride so we can eat (without guilt), vast quantities of good food. We ride for fitness and enjoyment, but we also ride because cycling is part of a deeper lifestyle that includes good food and wine, excellent conversation and a loving family – all of the things that truly make life worth living.
Othon Ochsner, Cathy Johnson, Tulio Campagnolo, Eugene Johnson
No one in the US cycling industry understands that better than Othon Henry Ochsner II. Ochsner is the CEO and President of an import company that bears his family name, a company that was founded by his father in 1962 and where Othon has worked for 26 years. Othon Sr. began Ochsner & Ochsner Importers to fuel a passion for cycling that began in 1912 when he first raced his bicycle, a skill that culminated in 1919 when he won the Swiss Pursuit Championship. Three years later Othon moved to Colorado and began work as a chef, eventually working at the prestigious Broadmoor Hotel where he met his future wife Catherine. They eventually had four children, one of whom is the man that runs the company bearing his family name.
“I have such a great respect for my father,” says Othon Ochsner today of his father, who died in 1981. “He worked very hard and was so tough athletically, yet it was from him that I learned my appreciation for good food and wine.” It’s small wonder that the surname on his company’s masthead is a source of motivation for Ochsner. “I have a great respect for Colnago, for Cinelli, for Valentino Campagnolo – for any company that still uses its family name and has a family member at its head. They work very hard because they don’t want to embarrass their family name.”
Today, Ochsner International is run from a large building outside of Chicago. (One that includes a wine cellar underneath.) The company’s goal, according to it’s president, is to carry the finest cycling products in each category by scouring the world for what simply works better than everything else. The company imports Assos clothing from Switzerland, Cateye computers from Tokyo and Campagnolo components from Italy, in addition to many others. They’re not afraid to take on the unusual or extraordinary, and thus carry diverse items such as the official bicycle of the Swiss Army. (It’s a commuter bike on steroids.) That inhibition by convention and devotion to only the finer things has given Ochsner reason to expand beyond bicycles into his other passion: food and wine.
Ochsner International sells cookbooks by many of the world’s preeminent chefs, restaurants and cooking schools. They carry food guides and restaurant guides including one written by Othon Ochsner that is in its 12th edition. The company also carries – of course – fine Swiss chocolates. “I am fortunate enough to get to travel all over the world with this company,” says Ochsner. “No matter where I am or how tired I am from a day of meetings and trade shows, I refuse to just go to the hotel room and order in. I go back to the hotel room, shower, put on a nice suit and go out to the best restaurant I can find. It’s one of the better ways to enjoy a city.” That adventurous spirit, combined with Ochsner’s infectious, gregarious personality is one of the driving forces behind a company that has brought in many of the cycling products cyclists crave so much. “We never want to be as big as Quality or others,” says Ochsner. “We never want to be the biggest but we feel as though we’re one of the best.”
