Roel Paulissen is a very fast man. The Belgian rider has a string of victories and medals to his name and more recently was crowned Marathon World Champion and winner of the Cape Epic stage race this year. For the Beijing Olympics, a special bike was prepared – this is it.

The heart of the bike is Cannondale’s Scalpel frame, made using high-modulus carbon fibre fused with aluminium. The head tube and most of the down and top tubes are carbon fibre, with aluminium tubes moulded in and welded to the alu seat tube. There’s enough flex through carbon seat and chainstays to remove the need for a conventional pivot, and a carbon-bodied DT Swiss shock takes care of the bump soaking.

As you’d expect on any bike destined to be ridden at the top level, the spec is a list of money-no-object lightweight components. Up front there’s an 88+ tuned Lefty Speed SL fork with an inner tube cannibalised to keep dust and dirt out of the seals. Transmission is a mix of SRAM X.0 (with twist shifters) and FSA, with Avid Juicy Ultimate providing the stopping power. Pedals are the ultralight Crank Brothers Eggbeater 4 Ti, saddle is a Fizik Arione with carbon rails, FSA supply the straight carbon bars and stem is an FRM carbon item. The short stubby bar ends have been wrapped in track tape for a bit of extra grip when climbing.

Paulissen had some interesting wheels with which to challenge for Olympic success. Mavic supplied a pair of tubular wheels to which were glued Vredestein Black Panther tubular tyres – the tyres offer a very low knob height and little weight to impede progress on the fast and dusty Beijing MTB course.

Cannondale claim all this lot weighs is 8.8kg – we couldn’t actually verify because the bike was firmly clamped to the show stand at Eurobike.