This company's smallest tri bike is a 49cm, and as is often the case with tri bikes from any company, the bike doesn't actually measure 49cm anywhere. The seat tube, center to top, measures 47cm. In keeping with today's tri bike sizing conventions, the 49cm size seems so-labeled because it's the size you'd buy if it was your typical old-style road bike you were buying.

All the Transition models come with 700c wheels, and Specialized never did buy into the whole 650c thing, even with women's specific road race bikes. This is curious, because if you'd guess which among America's two grand flagship bike companies were most likely to take an intuitive, intrepid leap into unknown waters of women's bikes that make sense it would be the free-thinking, Summer-of-Love, Silicon Valley, Jeans and Birkenstock wearing, artsy fartsy company, not the Midwest, core values, slow-to-change, substance-first company. Yet it is Specialized that has remained what we at Slowtwitch consider behind the times in this regard, and as a result women are not serviced as well at Specialized as they are by the engineers and designers at Trek.

Evidence of this can be found in the Transition, and in making our case let us make an academic inquiry. Considering the fact that Specialized uses one wheel size -- 700c -- for all its road bike models and sizes, what is the "perfect" size bike and rider for this wheel? In other words, what rider is the archetype around which this size has been selected? If we can stipulate that the wheel was chosen in an age when cycling was even more male-centric than it is now, a good bet would be the center of the size range among male cyclists. Even better would be the center of the size range among those reaching the somewhat shorter stature of circa-WWI Europe. A pretty good guess might be 54cm or 55cm, that is, it's arguable that this size represented the fat of the male-rider bell curve when the modern safety bicycle's wheel diameter plus tire size and profile was fixed at what we now call 700c (but which is generally, with an inflated tire, at around 675mm).

The radius of a 650c wheel (plus tire) is right about 94% the size of a 700c wheel/tire. If you consider the dimensions of a 5'10" man, whether expressed as saddle height, inseam, or overall height, and you reduce this by the proportion associated with these two wheel sizes, you get the female analog: the 5'4" woman. If you want to make a bike that's going to handle exactly like the bike built for the man, making that bike proportionally 6% smaller gives it to you.

Specialized, along with a host of other companies, does not buy into this. It shrinks the frame, but displaces this frame over the larger wheel size and does what is required to fix problems of cockpit distance, head tube height, and shoe overlap -- problems which definitely do present themselves once the bike gets below 50cm.

Accordingly, the height of the Transition line becomes problematic for average-to-small women who are riding average-to-aggressive aero positions. We can see this expressed in the stack of these bikes, which in their 49cm size is just a tad under 50cm. This means the frame of the Airfoil Pro in its smallest size sits a full 6cm closer to the bottom bracket, in the vertical plane, than the Transition's smallest size. Felts, QRs, Cervelos all sit between 3cm and 5cm lower than the 49cm Transition. Its their 650c wheels that allow for this.

This does not mean that the Transitions are bad bikes, or built incorrectly. It's just that there is a swathe of riders (mostly female) who cannot fit aboard these bikes. One can see why Lori Bowden -- who has ridden exclusively Cheetahs and Specialized bikes over the past decade or so, and spent more time under contract to Specialized than any other bike brand during her career -- never rode a 700c Specialized. There is no chance she could get sufficiently low on the Specialized production geometries.

That established, there are things you can do to make a "tall" frame ride a bit shorter. It's clear that there are substantial variations in the armrest profile represented among our sport's currently manufactured aero bars. In the case of the bars made by Hed, Oval, or Blackwell, the armrests sit about 2.5cm to 3.0cm above the centerline of the pursuit bar. With Visiontech, the armrests sit 3.0cm to 3.5cm above the base bar. So, by spec'ing bars with low-profile armrests, a bike maker can "lower" the front of its bikes.

But Specialized does not do this. Its Transitions are spec'd with Profile Design's T2 Cobras or Carbon Strykes (depending on the bike model), with armrests that sit about 6cm above the centerline of the pursuit bar. So a frame with a tall front end is made taller still by the spec choice Specialized makes.

Does this mean a T2 Cobra is an intrinsically bad spec? Absolutely not. It is one of the two or three most important and necessary OE specs in the triathlon industry. But the best use of this bar is with a frame that with an average-to-low front end, and in fact this is the bar spec'd on the very low 47cm Airfoil Pro. This bike arguably needs the T2 Cobra's extra armrest pad height for riders who are 5'6" or 5'7", or who are shorter but who ride with a more upright position. The Airfoil's Cobras would need to be pulled off and replaced by a low-profile aerobar if the rider is 5'4" or shorter, and/or rides with a more aggressive "Badmann/Bowden" type of aero position.

In the case of the Specialized Transition in size 49cm, the spec of the T2 Cobra or Carbon Stryke (at right, and spec'd on the Transition Elite) might be fine for a taller rider. Remember that the circumscription of this present investigation concerns bikes for short riders (chiefly those 5'6" and shorter).

In this context, the Transition makes a slew of design and spec choices -- including 700c wheels and high profile aerobars -- that mean a shorter rider will find these bikes challenging. He or she is going to change the aerobars and stem pitch for sure, and even then the frame's 700c wheel may preclude a proper fit. One can glean from its studio photos that the bike's front-end "shortness" is not given particular priority, with the 2cm tall headset top cap, and the 1cm spacer between the armrest trough and its bracket. Specialized would do itself and its dealers a favor if, at least on the 49cm versions of its bikes, it spec'd zero-stack headset top caps, minus-17 degree stems, and caution its dealers against spacers under the armrests for their floor-builds.

Of course these are not mandatory spec decisions for any company's shortest tri bikes. It's just that they are made mandatory when a brand's smallest-sized tri bikes are built atop 700c wheels. Read more about Specialized' tri bikes here.