ENA Company of Friends
Fabrizio Dragoni took up downhill mountain bike racing when he was in his thirties, already old enough to be considered a ‘master’. Dragoni threw himself at the sport and went straight to the top of his category, winning the Italian national championships seven times. Then, four years ago, he moved into the elite category to race against Italy’s fastest downhillers – many of them 20-plus years his junior. Most people will never race elite-level downhill, let alone in their forties; Dragoni is unlike most people.
It goes without saying that Dragoni is full of energy and spirit, but his success does not stop at race results. Since founding Ochain, in 2019, he has built a ‘company of friends’, as he puts it, that has created and developed a successful product used by countless downhill and enduro World Cup racers (Ochain has multiple elite-level wins in 2025 alone).
The idea for Ochain came to Dragoni when he saw several World Cup racers pull out top-tier results despite losing their chains (Neko Mulally, fourth place, World Championships, Hafjell, Norway, 2014; Aaron Gwin, first place, World Cup, Leogang, Austria, 2015). He pondered how it might be possible to simulate the feeling of chainless riding that removes any potential negative interaction between drivetrain and suspension action, and several years later the solution came to him – Ochain was born (well, Nochain was born, but the company soon rebranded to Ochain).
Dragoni’s uniform when we visited him on a humid summer’s day at Ochain headquarters – a modest office and assembly plant among sprawling centuries-old farm buildings on a quiet street in Varese, northern Italy – was an Ochain t-shirt, black bike shorts, Ochain-branded Stance socks and Crankbrothers flat pedal shoes – a bike rider through-and-through.
A while earlier we’d met with Enrico Faggioli, Ochain’s CMO by title but also a longtime friend of Dragoni. Faggioli has been instrumental in building Ochain into something so valuable that, despite being a relatively tiny brand among cycling’s behemoths, and its near zero-euro sponsorship budget, it has appeared on the bikes of countless top-level professional racers, right alongside the logos of the world’s biggest bike manufacturers.
Dragoni and Faggioli knew each other from riding and racing long before Ochain, and their characters perfectly complement one another: Dragoni, an engineer by trade, driven by passion and ideas, Faggioli, who studied psychology, passionate about brand and business. With the support and dedication of a team of design, engineering, sales and office staff, Ochain has grown into a company nobody can ignore. And with its acquisition by SRAM, it will soon be on every rider’s radar.
