HEAD OVER HEELS

THE BIKES THAT STOLE OUR HEARTS

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TRAVIS ENGEL

If I were allowed to keep just one bike from this year’s Bible, free of charge, my choice would be the Specialized Enduro. That is the simple criteria we use to pick our Bible favorites, after all. We don’t pick a best-of in each category or build a dream quiver. And we don’t fret over price points. If we were to consider the real-world compromise it’d take to buy one of these bikes on a print journalist’s or freelancer’s salary, it wouldn’t exactly be a ‘favorite’ by our definition. But when I rode the Ibis Ripmo AF (page 64), that word ‘compromise’ never came to mind. The least expensive bike in this year’s bunch, the Ripmo AF is arguably the most versatile. Its linkage is so dialed that the relatively weighty build never bothered me on the climbs. And its geometry and suspension components do enough heavy lifting to run with that Enduro. I found myself utterly floating through the chaos on the Ripmo AF. Not quite like the Enduro, but that’s not the point. For $3,000 from a bike shop, anyone could ride anywhere. Because of how broadly this bike will spread the shred, it is by far my favorite.

MIKE FERRENTINO

This year was a reckoning of sorts for me. Having come to the realization that the current crop of big-wheel, big-travel, super-long bikes are more than I really know what to do with, I found my happy place between 130-140 millimeters of rear travel, but with a little added beef in the fork. The Orbea Occam is beautiful, surprisingly quick up-hill, an absolute anvil in an elevator shaft going down, and comes lavished with XTR componentry at a price that undercuts similarly specc’d weaponry by at least a grand. It is still a bit more burly than I really would want as my everywhere bike, however. Meanwhile, the