Cyclist
What we ride: Pete’s custom-built Legend
I am a bike-fitter’s nightmare. Whenever I have been for a fitting, the fitter has started out confidently enough by making a few adjustments to their jigs, but then they emerge from my inside leg and can’t believe their goniometers. The problem is my proportions – they’re all out of kilter, with a pair of long, skinny legs married to a short, stumpy body. If I dress entirely in pink, I can do a pretty good impression of a flamingo.
This means that fitting me to a stock frame usually requires some abomination involving a giant stack of spacers and an inverted stem. It works, but it’s ugly. For a long time, I was aware that if I was to get a bike that looked and rode how I wanted – befitting of my status as a cycling magazine editor – I would need to go custom.
Love at first sight
It was in 2013, the early days of Cyclist, when we did a feature about bespoke framebuilder Marco Bertoletti, that I knew I’d found the bike for me.
Bertoletti is one of those effortlessly suave Italians who is steeped in the grand traditions of framebuilding but is focussed on performance rather than dewy-eyed heritage. He claims that, back in the day, he made frames for all the big Italian brands and all the great names (although he’s one of the few Italian framebuilders who doesn’t claim to have made all of Eddy Merckx’s bikes).
But when carbon came along and most manufacturing moved to the Far East, Bertoletti started making small numbers of high-end custom frames in titanium and carbon, and occasionally both together. He called his new brand Legend.
Personally, I think it’s a rubbish name. It sounds like the house brand of a cheap retailer who is desperately trying to make their shoddy bikes seem more glamorous. It’s like calling your brand Mega Bikes. He should have just called it Bertoletti, but I think he wanted to get away from the whole Italian nostalgia thing and give it a modern, international appeal.
Name aside, it was the look of the bike that most appealed to me; the simple elegance of the silhouette, with its round tubes and raw carbon finish. I could have any colour I wanted, but why would you paint over that beautiful carbon weave?
And being fully custom, each tube length and angle could be adjusted to suit my needs. Even the stiffness of the carbon tubes could be modified to give a softer or harder ride. The whole thing was then put together by hand in Bertoletti’s workshop in Bergamo – he even sent me a photo of him putting the finishing touches to my frame. You don’t get that from Canyon.
Age shall not wither it
What you see here is the result. To my eye, it still looks great ten years down the line. Its genius is to have combined a fairly huge stack with a relatively short reach without looking like a clown bike. The proportions are – visually, at least – all correct, and it fits like a glove.
It’s light, stiff, racy and agile. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that, thanks to its 52mm trail, it’s as twitchy as a rabbit that has stumbled into Crufts. But that’s how I like it.
This is an all-Italian bike, built at a time when there was little consideration for all-road versatility. Tyre clearance is designed around 23mm tyres – I’ve managed to squeeze in 28mm Goodyears, but if anything thicker than a Rizla paper gets stuck to the tread then I’m in danger of jamming to a sudden halt.
The frame’s complete lack of any aero profiling is offset by a pair of super-aero Enve 3.4 wheels, and the Shimano Dura-Ace 9000 groupset was the peak of shifting technology in 2013, but now I just keep it on because I like the way it looks. And it still works beautifully.
After a decade of adventures, the decals are starting to peel off, the crank arms are scuffed, the bolts in the outrageously sculpted bottle cages are starting to rust. I’m on the second set of wheels, third saddle (currently a nifty Fizik 3D printed job) and third cassette, as well as numerous changes to chains, cables, bar tape and tyres.
But essentially it’s the same bike I set up in 2013, and I think it still stands up against the competition, both in terms of aesthetics and ride quality. And when today’s bikes are looking tired and dated a few years from now, the Legend will continue to be a picture of elegance and craftsmanship.
Still a rubbish name, though.
As the man who dreamed up Cyclist and launched it as editor in 2012, Pete Muir has long been a champion of cycling innovation – so long as it involves making bikes more comfortable for his ageing body parts.
• This article originally appeared in issue 147 of Cyclist magazine. Click here to subscribe
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