Bicycle of the weekLife and style This article is more than 6 years oldReviewGiant Defy Advanced Pro: bike preview
This article is more than 6 years oldWant to know what it feels like to ride like a pro? This new Giant road bike should be your first step
The last few weekends have seen cycle fans avidly following the season’s first arduous one-day professional road races, or Monuments, from across the Channel. ‘Pro’ is an often overused term when it comes to bike-speak, but this new Giant does indeed boast many of the latest technologies that Giant’s pro riders will be using this year. It shares the full carbon frame and fork, the Shimano hydraulic disc brakes and the RideSense ANT transmitter which automatically sends speed and cadence data back to your laptop or smartphone. However, what will really impress you are the system-built wheels shod with tubeless tyres. The first time you put pressure on the pedals, you feel such a surge from the back wheel you wonder if the bike has been pre-mechanically doped. (edinburghbicycle.com)
Price: £2,899
Frame: advanced-grade composite, electronic ready
Fork: advanced-grade composite, full-composite OverDrive 2 Steerer
Drivetrain: Shimano Ultegra 22-speed
Brakes: Shimano BR-RS805 hydraulic disc brakes, 140mm rotors
Wheels: Giant SLR 1 Disc WheelSystem
Of riders and bicycles
We’ve all read and loved The Rider by Tim Krabbé – a book that many regard as the best ever written about the subjective experience of cycling and the strange allure of endurance sport. And if Tim Krabbé recommends a book about riders and bicycles you can be assured it’s one you’ll want to pick up.
On the back cover of Wilfried de Jong’s new book The Man and His Bike, Krabbé has written: ‘Sit down and let Wilfried guide you through the wondrous world of cycling’. It’s excellent advice.
Wilfried de Jong is a star of Dutch sports writing and broadcasting, but he’s hardly known at all in Britain. This book will change that. He has a wonderful way with words and his book is a rich collection of his varied cycling tales – from riding along rivers and over mountains, and speeding through the midnight streets of Manhattan, and from coming to grief in the hills of Umbria to bouncing across the cobbles of the Hell of the North. He is a terrific guide: understated, comic and melancholic, and all the while trying to uncover the true soul of cycling. Why we cycle, why we watch it, why we hate it and, more than anything, why we love it.
In some ways the book is a series of very different short stories all based around Wilfried’s unifying theme: why are we so obsessed with a sport that involves so pain, punishment and misery for the odd flash of transcendental joy?
Read it and you’ll get to know yourself a little bit better. Finally a word of warning: from the cover picture Wilfried looks terrifying and rather intimidating. But once you get to know him you’ll find him warm, funny and charming. Go on treat yourself. It’ll inspire you to get back on your bike…
The Man and His Bike by Wilfried de Jong is published by Ebury Press on 27 April at £14.99. To order a copy for £12.74, go to bookshop.theguardian.com
Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @MartinLove166
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