Canyon Nerve AL 9.9

After Dan Saunders did his best to destroy our first mountain bike and himself, for CycletechReview’s second mtb review ever, Alastair McNeill has ventured off to the Alps, by way of the Pyrenees and the Costa Brava (no one here does things by halves), with the mighty Canyon Nerve AL 9.9 29er to tackle the Grand Raid Cristalp…

Words by Alastair McNeill

 

Is the Canyon Nerve AL 9.9 the right bike for the Grand Raid Cristalp? The seeds for this review were sewn some time ago during a slightly inebriated conversation I had with a friend in a South London pub. It went something like this, “There cannot be too many organised cycling events harder than La Marmotte. 174km across the Alps, taking in 4 iconic but brutally long and steep climbs. Once you have dusted Col de Glandon, Telegraph and Galibier you then have to haul your exhausted body up the 21 hairpins that combine to make up the Alpe D’Huez. 5400m of vertical climbing in a single day was quite enough for me. What can compare?”

 

The reply came almost immediately, “Try the Grand Raid Cristalp. You get your 5000m of torturous Alpine climbing over a 124km course. However, it’s all off road. Oh, and some of it is so disgustingly steep and rocky that you’ll need to carry your bike up it. It is often described as the hardest one day mountain bike event in the calendar, or simply the ‘Torture Tour’”… Read More >