We travelled to Italy last month to check out the Langma, Liv’s new women’s-specific road bike. The lightweight, top-of-the-line spec model features a full carbon frame and fork and SRAM Red eTap drivetrain, with the Liv Sunweb pro team using the flagship bike.
A few years ago, the road bike offering at a top female level was a very different place to today. Female roadies will know that not too long ago, the argument for women-specific bikes was a much quieter one. Getting a good bike was a case of finding a unisex frame and tweaking it to find a better fit for a woman’s body. A high performance road bike, built from the ground up for a female body, either sat only at the uber-expensive custom level, or felt simply non-existent.
Nowadays, the movement for female-specific frames is growing, along with consumer demand. Recently we went out to Follina in Italy with Liv, one of the bike brands that changed the female market, to catch up with the developments on this interesting discussion and meet the company’s new offering, the Langma.
First Impressions: Liv Hail and the Liv Pique
Liv is a brand that lives and breathes women’s cycling at every level, putting time and engineering into making high-end performance bikes using bespoke female geometry, based on a global body dimension database, the expertise of top female engineers and guidance from a team of pro riders.
Langma, the most recent offering from the Liv school of thought, is a bike two years in the making and it claims to be developed for riders who need the lightest of bikes for racing, offering the kind of climbing efficiency that will help you ‘fly to the summit’. Joining the Envie and Avail in Liv’s line up, the Langma fills the super-lightweight model space for the company.
