Originally Posted by xlbs

I'm not a pedant by any stretch, but all of the French speaking bicycle people I know in Canada always pronounced it as rhyming with "Aflac"---and I know a lot of them. I know that it's an acronym, but it is French, and the rules of French phonetics would suggest that the first "A" is soft, not hard. I also know that our friends down there in the US of A have difficulty with French pronunciation at the best of times. I'm not being a snob, but you folks just don't say it right, just as we Canadians can't say "garage" or "roof" or "about" correctly according to American ears!