Giant is sticking it's big toe a little deeper into the waters of triathlon. Last year it had one tri bike, the TCR Aero, but it was a hedged bet. It was a road geometry bike built with aero tubes and it had an aero bar stuck onto it. The worst thing that could happen is that triathletes wouldn't like it. In that case Giant had a fallback plan. It was also their one and only road race bike with shaped tubes. Just take the aero bar off and presto, a bike that competes with the aero compact geometry road bikes from Specialized.
While not exactly diving in head-first, Giant has come out with a second model. It's now got the TCR Aero I and II. The price point of the "I" has gone to $2200, and the "II" is at $1700-ish, where the single tri model was priced last year. The "I" now has pursuit bars and bar-end shifting, which means that if a dealer can't sell it, he'll have to do a lot more than pull the aero bars off in order to make it a road race bike.
Any reader of Slowtwitch knows what high esteem I hold Giant in, but I always find it funny that companies don't consider, when they build a bike, how their extremely high-priced sponsored pros ride. In Giant's booth, hanging from wires just above the TCR Aero series bikes, dangles Abraham Olano's world championship TT bike. It was up just as the Spaniard rode it. It's got a saddle that you won't find in any catalog. It looks to be a Sella San Marco Rolls (though I don't know for sure) but with a truncated nose. It's a steeper than normal bike, and the nose—which would be 7cm or so behind the bottom bracket axle on Olano's road race bike, is so far forward that it had to be cut off, to meet the UCI regulation of 5cm behind the BB (a rule triathletes don't need to worry about). You'd think that Giant would heed stuff like this and, since they're outfitting the bike with an aero front end, throw a few extra degrees in the seat angle and lop a couple of centimeters off the top tube.
There are bikes that wow consumers, and then there are those that wow dealers. The Cervelo One has been retooled to attract a different customer, and it was the bike tri-specific dealers talked about more than any other. It has a price of $999, and it's not as aggressive in its geometry as are Cervelo's P2k and P3. The bike has a mid-range seat angle, a higher head tube, and road race bars with a shortish clip-on attached. It has STI shifting, and is really the first bike I can remember of its type. Previously, bike makers (i.e., C'dale) have mitigated a full-on tri frame by hanging a road front end on it. Or there is the Giant above, with a tri front end hung on a road geometry frame. The One is mid-range throughout, with a mid-range frame geometry.
The "Dual" replaces the "One" in Cervelo's $1500 price range. But a P2k-like seat tube replaces the "old" One's round seat tube. Get all that? Cervelo has upped the ante with the Dual in a very popular price point, and the other tri bike makers will have to respond to it (no one at the show did).
The closest thing I saw at the show to compare with the One was QR's new Zero Gravity. QR has reprised an old model name and placed it onto a bike that is its version of a 'tweener, and it had my favorite cosmetic scheme of any tri bike at the show. But the mostly Ultegra-equipped ZG is not a cheap bike, with a price of $2095.
The "old" ZG was a steel bike, tri geometry through and through, and its riders set course records a decade ago that have still never been broken, including the only sub-5 hour women's ride at IM Canada, the women's bike course record on the Auckland IM New Zealand course, and I don't know if anyone ever rode the Zofingen course faster than Zack did when he won the race (in '92?) on a ZG. The new ZG is spec'd like a road race bike and has a 76-degree seat angle. Will the new ZG live up to the heritage of its namesake?
QR also has a retooled TiPhoon, and now it's a lot more like its sister company's Blade. Like the Blade it has a rear wheel cutout. It'll have horizontal rear-entry dropouts with set screws, like Cervelo's. It's also gotten rid of that silly horizontally flattened top tube and replaced it with a Blade-like vertically flattened tube.
The TiPhoon is $800 cheaper than the Blade, though, and now that the Blade cannot be purchased by the dealer as a bare frame, I expect the TiPhoon to become a lot more popular. An Ultegra-equipped TiPhoon will go for $3700, a Dura Ace Blade is almost $2000 higher in price.
On the subject of ti bikes, I was impressed with those by Guru. This Canadian manufacturer is better known for its aluminum bikes, and in fact it wasn't until I called and spoke to Guru last month that I found out they make ti bikes. These are ti frames with carbon here and there—a trend started a few years ago by Seven Cycles—and the Guru ti bikes look sort of like Calfees in their joints and Litespeeds everywhere else. Since they can be bought custom, I sure wouldn't mind a Guru built as a tri bike to my specs. It might not be as aero as a TiPhoon, and certainly not as aero as a P3 or a Rocket TT, but I'd look maahvelous.
