Cielo: Sportif
How about this for a trend: bikes that are damn fun to ride. The Cielo Sportif comes from the mind of Chris King, the guy whose best-in-the-world headsets have given him a near-cult-leader status in the cycling world. (He also makes bottom brackets, hubs, singlespeed cogs, tools and lots of small parts.) King started out as a frame builder in 1978, then gradually gave up that side of his business to concentrate on headsets. But he never stopped wanting to make his own frames and in 2008, when his business finally allowed him enough freedom, he picked the torch back up and began welding.
The result was a bike built for (and named after) a challenging road in California he frequented three decades ago. This is a bike for hard rambling: We descended washboarded, steep dirt roads with no fork chatter or squirreliness; bombed full-speed across sketchy railroad tracks; and leaned into hairpins so hard we winced in anticipation of the bike breaking loose (which it never did). But it's also good for smooth cruising and occasional bursts of blurry-eyed speed: We took it on 70 miles of smooth road with a nice stop for lunch and mixed it up in the big roadie-purist sprint on the daily lunch ride. This isn't the best bike for the LT-plus-max weekend training ride or the Saturday throwdown with the local Cat 1s—but if you can't tell that by looking at the Brooks saddle you have no business on either the saddle or the Cat 1 ride anyway.
You can try to get one of the few Cielos that King will create himself—you have to call to find out the wait time and pricing—or do as we did and go with the large-batch handmade program, which lets you pick from the in-stock options made to King's specifications. (The bike we tested was welded by Jay SyCip, who is himself considered a master frame builder and ran his own business for 16 years before joining King.) Ours has stainless-steel horizontal rear dropouts, an integrated seat clamp, gorgeous detailing on the head tube and front drops made at King. Normally when we review a handmade steel bike we go googly-eyed at such details. But with the Cielo it's the ride that stands out. Finally, we have to note that this may be the first time in history that consumers have a chance to buy a bike to match their headset, instead of the other way around.
Buy It If: You ride like a grizzly bear runs
Forget It If: You're more of a gazelle
