Yesterday we covered the launch of the Liv Avail Advanced and Advanced Pro endurance bikes from Giant’s Liv women’s bike brand. Today it’s the turn of the men, with the new fifth-generation Giant Defy Advanced range.
A previous generation of the Defy Advanced was ridden to victory in Paris-Roubaix by John Degenkolb in 2015 and Greg van Avermaet rode a gold Giant Defy at the same race in 2019.
Giant says that the blueprint for the new Defy is less weight, better ride quality, no gimmicks. A smoother bike is a faster bike, it asserts, especially on less than perfect roads.
As you’d expect, the men’s Defy Advanced endurance bike and the Liv Avail Advanced share much in common, but whereas the Avail is available with Advanced and Advanced Pro framesets, the Defy adds an Advanced SL tier above these.
Naturally, Giant says that the Advanced SL level – rather than the Pro frameset – is used across its range of bikes by its pro cyclists.
New premium frameset tier
The Defy Advanced SL frameset weighs a claimed 785g. As you’d expect, this takes a chunk of weight off the previous generation top spec frame: 293g to be precise, or fully 19.9 percent, but even the Defy Advanced Pro is claimed to be 153g lighter than its predecessor. There’s a 15 percent decrease in the fork’s weight to 350g and an eight percent decrease in handlebar weight.
Giant also claims that the new SL tier bike ups pedalling efficiency (which it defines as the bike’s stiffness-to-weight) by 28 percent over the previous generation Pro, while the new Pro model is 11 percent more efficient than its predecessor. The corresponding figure for the base model Advanced frameset is 4.3 percent relative to the previous generation Defy Advanced.
As with the Liv Avail, there’s clearance for 38mm tyres and, except for the top spec bike, which gets Cadex wheels and tyres, the bikes are specced with Giant 32mm tyres on Giant’s own wheels.
The Defy Advanced frames all allow you to fit mudguards and include a removable rear triangle bridge. They include bottle cages and an out-front computer mount.
New D-Fuse components and aero stem
Again, following on from the Liv Avail Advanced, the 2024 Giant Defy Advanced range uses a new array of D-Fuse components. For each, there are either two or three spec levels: the SLR is fitted to higher spec bikes, the SL to mid-spec and…
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