SENSIBLE DESTRUCTION
EVIL OFFERING | $7,400 X01
THE MOST EVEN-KEELED TRAIL BIKE EVIL HAS EVER MADE, BUT WITH ALL THE POP AND PLAY YOU’D EXPECT.
Close your eyes for a second and picture the typical Evil rider. Let me guess, the rider is wearing kneepads, baggy shorts, a T-shirt, Five Ten shoes and a hip bag with a PBR in it. The person is a gravity-focused ‘shredder’ primarily concerned with ‘getting rad’ and drives a lifted Toyota Tundra with a North Shore rack. I suppose when you name a company Evil, you’re kind of asking for that sort of clientele. And when you make bikes like The Following, that redefine just how ‘rad’ one could get on a 29-inch-wheeled bike with 120 millimeters of travel, you cement that rep.
Now, close your eyes and imagine the typical Niner rider. Is it a spandex-clad, protein-shake drinking, fitness-obsessed leg-shaver with a heart-rate monitor, one of those Garmin-mount stem topcaps and a Strava sticker on a Subaru Outback?
The bummer about this sort of typecasting is the Evil rider might never know that Niner makes a super legit, shredable steel hardtail. And likewise, the ‘Ninerd’ doesn’t realize Evil makes a bike that might just climb better than any bike that rider’s ever been on.
Evil is so strongly seen on the gravity-fed, adrenaline-junkie side of the sport, that it’s easy to forget just how well-rounded, easy-to-ride and versatile nearly every Evil model is. There’s so much talk about how rad this or that Evil can get, that it’d be forgivable to assume the company’s new mid-travel, 140-millimeter 29er would be a full-on enduro sled.
In its stock configuration, the Offering is anything but. Enduro bikes are made specifically to favor descending, but equipped with a 140-millimeter RockShox Pike, the way Evil specs the Offering, it’s decidedly undecided about what it’d rather be doing—besides getting off the ground—it knows it likes doing that. And cornering.
The Offering is a perfectly balanced trail bike, with a helping of that unmistakeable Evil maliciousness. Descending, it has more of a jumpy, jibby vibe than a plow-through-everything feel. While bikes like the Yeti SB130 and Ibis Ripmo might have slightly firmer pedaling platforms for climbing, the Offering’s traction is second to none—cornering, climbing and descending.
The climbing position on this Evil is better than ever. In its steepest mode (flip chips in the high position with a 140-millimeter fork) the effective seat tube angle is 77 degrees, 2.2-degrees steeper than Evil’s next steepest models. That’s steep enough that even if you flip the chips to the low/slack setting and bump fork travel to 150 millimeters, the seat angle is still 75 degrees. It’s also quite long, with a reach on a size large of 480 millimeters. Because it shifts the center of mass forward, the steep seat angle makes the already-efficient suspension system feel even better. For that reason, we think it’s actually a better climber than Evil’s Following MB.
It’s undoubtedly a better descender, with its additional 20 millimeters of travel and nearly degree-slacker headtube angle (65.6-66.6 degrees, depending on fork travel and geometry setting). So why choose a Following MB over an Offering? We couldn’t tell you. The Offering has more of that magic-carpet, hover-bike D.E.L.T.A suspension, without any noticeable sacrifice.
We all agreed that the Offering felt more like a bigger Following than a smaller Wreckoning, which can be good or bad depending on one’s wishes. Putting a 150-millimeter Lyrik on the front results in more security on steeper descents, and almost identical climbing—not an altogether different beast. Even
