After nearly two years of planning, Cannondale last weekend called a global summit in Gran Canaria to announce the release of two new bikes—the 130-millimeter travel Rize and the 160-millimeter Moto.

The two new platforms split duties of what Cannondale has identified as “all-mountain” and “big-mountain,” and the long-awaited additions round out the company’s mountain bike lineup, which now includes six bikes stretching from the 100-millimeter Scalpel to the 220-millimeter Judge.

The bikes will replace Cannondale’s four-year-old Prophet, which with 5.5 inches of travel and weighing in around the 27-ish-pound mark with a carbon Lefty fork was as much ahead of its time in the all-mountain category as it was unconventional in appearance.

Both new bikes will be made in Cannondale’s Bedford, Pennsylvania, factory and come backed with a no-rider-weight-limit lifetime frame warranty.

The bikes’ unveiling came via a mass flogging by some 40 international cycling media wankers. After racking up seven flat tires in just two days of riding, I can vouch for the legitimacy of Gran Canaria’s rugged mountains.

Rize Up
The Rize has a lot going on, and its backbone is as good a place to start as any. Cannondale called on decades of experience working with aluminum to produce what appears to be an industry first: a BB shell, main pivot and seat tube all made from a single forging.

This “backbone” bypasses the difficulties of keeping welded frame pivots and BB shells properly aligned, while simultaneously taking advantage of forging’s considerable strength-to-weight benefits.

In terms of forging technology, Cannondale has pulled off quite the feat. It’s easy to imagine the 3D forging process, with high-grade aluminum flowing into place like Play-Doh, but actually making it happen is about as easy as solving a Rubix cube drunk and blindfolded...with your feet. According to Cannondale’s test lab engineers, all that work pays off with four times the fatigue life over a welded structure. And it’s lighter.

Cannondale also employs a key forging for the Rize’s main-pivot yoke, which connects asymmetrical chainstays for what Cannondale says is its stiffest rear end ever—including the Moto you’re about to read about, and its current downhill bike.

The Rize will come with two frame options across five different models ranging from $1,799 to $5,499. The two high-end models feature carbon fiber front triangles, and all of them have the backbone, forged yoke and carbon seat stays.

Both the Rize and Moto are modified single-pivot designs, and the two make a good case that all single pivots are not created equal.

Dan Conners, the engineer who led the Rize project, explains that moving any one point in the linkage as little as 5 millimeters could make the difference between a rising rate and a falling rate. In the case of the Rize, which uses an, ahem, “Rizing rate” linkage, the idea is that the bike will be supple off the top, stable in the middle for pedaling and have an end-stroke that plays nice with air shocks’ inherently progressive nature.


The Prophet, by comparison, had a falling rate. It’s a subtle difference that Cannondale engineers use to point that this new bike is directed more toward all-day/every-day all-kinds-of-trails trail riding, where priority is put on efficiency with a little extra somethin’ to boost.

True to Cannondale’s style, the rest of the Rize is rife with “System Integration,” including an integrated headset and Lefty one-piece stem-steerer with an optional all-new air-sprung Lefty fork called the PBR (Push Button Rebound/Lockout); Lefty front hub (now available from Mavic and Shimano); a BB30 bottom bracket with integrated bearings and a hollow 30-millimeter spindle that spins Hollogram SI cranks (lightest, stiffest mountain cranks on the market).

Indeed, this bike takes the plug-and-play parts compatibility that most other mountain bike companies abide by and turns it on its head. And when you consider the system as a whole, it sounds complicated. But the philosophy behind it is simple: make it stronger, make it lighter, and don’t compromise.

The bottom line is pretty simple, too. The Rize has a potential system weight (understood here as frame, fork/stem/steerer/headset/front hub, crank/BB, rear shock) of just 4,665 grams (10.3 pounds), which Cannondale claims to be the lightest in its class.


With the actual weights of the bikes’ various pieces being sliced and diced umpteen ways, and, being on foreign soil, with all those figures being slung around in Kilos and “stone” and whatnot, I got on the bike not knowing exactly how much it weighed.


My first impression was that this bike is fast. All that SI mumbo jumbo makes for a super stiff rear end. Power transfer isn’t an easy thing to discern while riding unfamiliar trails and jet-lagged after an eight-time-zone pole vault that took 24 hours door-to-door. And you’re definitely not supposed to be able to feel it riding borrowed pedals because your luggage got lost. But through all that fog, I felt it. It all adds up, and this bike rips. It spins up to speed quickly, accelerates going uphill, and as a 130-millimeter bike with decent angles (68.5 headtube/72.5 seat tube angle), it points downhill fairly well, too.


I rode a carbon Lefty with a Fox RLC damper that, if it were my bike, I would have upgraded to a stiffer spring. But the new PBR fork, which borrows SRAM’s SoloAir technology, uses a negative air spring instead of a coil, making for the lightest 130-millimeter-travel fork on the market, weighting in at 2.9 pounds for the carbon version.


That fork, on the high-zoot carbon Rize makes for a complete bike weight of 24 pounds. Carbon Rize models will be available in April and alloy models are in production now.

SOURCE: pro-bike.it / roma and Chris Lesser on bikemag.com