The bike is dropped off by a softly spoken man called Neil.
It's a Norco 2025 Search C in agave. This is what it looks like.
After years of trying, I've finally cracked open cycling media's Ark of the Covenant: bike brands sending review bikes to your front door for you to ride. For free.
At the 2025 Tour de France we bumped into and had dinner with a Norco employee who then heard on the podcast a couple of months later that I'm trying to get in on the whole bike-reviewing game. Admittedly from a more vibes-based standpoint than the technical expertise of my colleagues.
My plan is to see if there's space for both. To create a new category of not-quite-proper-reviews for the non-technically literate bike rider. For those who can mostly just tell if something feels and looks good, is comfortable, durable, and easy to ride.
I've heard murmurs that Dave Rome's approach to reviewing a bike includes stripping the whole bike apart to check out every nook and cranny. That is an approach to work that I simply cannot fathom, but I am glad it exists, and so are many other people. Public service journalism for those planning on making a used car-sized financial outlay, but on a bicycle.
I also know there are people out there who ride bikes how I ride bikes. A couple of coffee rides a week, rarely longer than a couple of hours maximum, and who can change a flat tyre but anything more serious and it's off to the local bike shop.
Before I enacted my grand plan, though, I had to get it past the powers that be, which was no small task. So, I cautiously messaged Dave about my plan.
"Ideally we wouldn't call it a review," he said straight off the bat. Understandable. "Totally open to this being a little more entertainment or anything else creative."
Agreed. And so, equipped with my senses of sight and touch honed over 31 years of being alive, and the ability and willingness to ride a bike at an average speed of 22 km/h – nothing more, nothing less – this new bike arrives at my door in mid-November, just as winter sets in.
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