Singletrack Staff Blog

I’m in the fortunate position that I get to ride a lot of bikes, most good, some great and very few that I don’t get along with. The really special ones though are the ones that keep me awake at night reliving the brief time we’ve had together and see me daydreaming of ‘that’ corner that I pinned like never before on ‘that’ bike. One of those bikes for me last year was the Giant Anthem. As well as being a lot of fun to ride it could happily go out and make it’s living as a race bike or be ridden all day every day. We liked it enough to give it a Singletrack Recommended seal and you, our esteemed readers, voted it Bike of the Year ‘07 in our recent Singletrack Reader’s Awards. So I think we’re in agreement that it’s a fantastic bike.
For those of you who haven’t come across the Anthem before here’s a quick run down…
It’s a short travel, 90mm, full suspension bike available in aluminium and carbon flavours that weighs very little and loves to be screamed round race tracks or through twisty singletrack. Think that sums it up quite well.


When I asked Giant if I could get hold of an Anthem frame for my long term test bike I was pretty pleased when they sent me the Anthem Advanced. I say pretty pleased, I was over the moon. The Advanced is the carbon version of the Anthem, and it looks something like this:

Pretty, huh?


I’m still working on what to kit it out with, but so far I’ve settled on some Ritchey Carbon Low Rizer WCS bars and Ritchey Carbon WCS seatpost. Carbon shiny and light as well.

I’ll be documenting the build up here on the blog and there’ll more about our long termers in the mag. It’ll be interesting to see if my experiences of the Anthem were just a sweet holiday romance or will become an enduring love. Either way, I can’t wait to ride it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Blogroll . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.