IT’S TIME TO PUT OUR TOP THREE HEAD-TO-HEAD TO FIND THE WINNER OF... BIKE OF THE YEAR 2021 TRAIL
It’d be easy to fall into some clichés here, at the sharp end of our Trail Bike of the Year test. Yes, this year’s line-up was the hardest yet to judge. And yes, it was very hard to narrow down the top five to just three. Just as predictably, we only made our final decision about the winner – which we’ll reveal shortly – as we were writing these very paragraphs. But we’re sure you expected that anyway, so we’ll stop there.
While travel restrictions limited our potential to test further afield, we were blessed with some incredibly varied tracks and conditions local to our Bristol base, and then, in the final stages, a short drive away at BikePark Wales. Riding these eight bikes everywhere from steep, rutted mud tracks to bike park hardpack and frozen-solid woodland singletrack, we managed to test them just as hard as we might in any ‘normal’ year. That still didn’t make it an easy task, though – in part, because qualifying how good a trail bike is can be fairly tricky, when one person’s ideal bike needs to be able to traverse massive distances, while other riders effectively want an enduro bike with a tad less travel.
OUT IN A BLAZE OF GLORY
The top three should be fairly familiar to you, because it’s an almost identical repeat of last year’s. Bird, YT and Propain are here
