Sun will shine.

• Author: Kaelble, Steve
• Position: Sun Metal Products

If all goes well, an Indianapolis woman this summer will sprint around an Olympic cycling course in Barcelona, Spain, riding on bicycle rims from her home state.

Connie Paraskevin-Young, considered the top U.S. female match sprinter in cycling, will ride on Mistral rims made by Warsaw-based Sun Metal Products. "Connie is one of the strongest competitors in cycling in the U.S.," says Richard McKown, Sun's vice president of sales and marketing. "We are very pleased that she chose to ride on our American-made Sun Mistral alloy rims."

Sun's bicycle rims have the chance to capture gold in Barcelona, but the company's products are visible in a lot of other areas as well. Quite simply, Sun is the world's largest manufacturer of wire-spoked wheels; it makes some 4 million of them each year. The wheels move just about everything smaller than a car, including baby carriages, wheelchairs and golf carts.

In the wheelchair business, for example, Sun makes the world's lightest wheel. That's important for reasons that go beyond ease of everyday use; sport and athletic wheelchair use is a growing field, and Sun's expertise gives it a decided advantage over many of its competitors.

The wheel industry keeps rolling on through changes, Sun has found. The exercise-bike craze, for example, has provided a great market for Sun, but a number of manufacturers have decided to use wheels other than the wire-spoked variety. Sun's wheels for decades have been big in the lawn-and-garden industry and in...