Reports of the death of endurance road bikes are greatly exaggerated: a famous Mark Twain saying, or probably would have been were he alive today. It was certainly my feeling after my first ride on this new Defy Advanced SL0. The same ride, incidentally, where I listened to Dave Rome – on an Escape Collective podcast – cry out for performance-engineered endurance road bikes to re-enter the market.
‘What happened to them?’ he queried. Like The Sixth Sense, without any hope of anyone hearing, my internal voice replied: ‘It’s here! Giant has heard your prayers!’
Dave Rome isn’t wrong. In a confluence of events that combines road bikes moving to disc, opening space for more clearance and wider tyres; the rise in popularity of gravel; and the general recognition that wider tyres are more comfortable and just as fast, we have a situation
