Though you may not believe it, but when you’re fortunate slash spoilt rotten enough to be sent all manner of cycling products and accessories on a regular basis as part of your job you very quickly become jaded, grumpy and generally unenthusiastic about said products. It’s insane we know, but it really is true, all those pedals, jerseys, etc, etc, you always wished you could get your hands on quickly become just another word count, photo shoot or deadline to work your way through. And the more stuff you accumulate the harder it is for anything to break its way through the cloud of ‘meh, whatever’ and really standout, to impress, to become a keeper as it were. The great pair of shoes you’re currently riding in have only temporary command over your feet, as they’ll be slipping in the next pair of review shoes in a week or so, and so the cycle, ahem, continues.
So…verbose introduction now written, in the coming months we’re going to be highlighting some of the products that managed to poke their way through the journalistic gloom and as a result secured a coveted spot on the tiny shelf in the bedroom wardrobe where the other half permits our bike kit to live. These are products that for whatever reason managed to stick around, which weren’t set to one side once something new arrived, and which we still use day in and day out. Our greatest hits if you will. Side A, track 1, Giro’s Havik glasses.
Available in full or compact lens versions, my beloved Giro Havik specs are the compact version with the silver frame/rose lens combo. Now onto my third pair (pair one were left at the sign-in for the Tour Of Flanders sportive a couple of years back so I had to ride glasses-less in the pissing rain all day and pair two were claimed by a high speed smooch with some tarmac) they look really good on, they sit snugly in place on your face, the Zeiss lens is close to ocular perfection, they’re light weight, they sit snugly in the front of my Aeon helmet when I’m not wearing them, the lenses are easy to change and most importantly the bridge doesn’t irritate my nose. And that means I can wear these all day without a second thought. Basically, they’re everything I need, nay desire in a pair of cycling glasses and the added bonus is that they’re also a fair amount cheaper than a lot of other brand’s offerings out there. Granted the lack of venting to the lens may be an issue for some, but we haven’t really noticed much in the way of steaming even when it’s super hot and we’ve been giving it maximum beans. So, if we had to lob a grandiose tagline out there for these it’d probably be something along the lines of, ‘understated affordable brilliance’.
And that would be all he wrote, if it weren’t for one particularly upsetting piece of information we recently received from Giro’s UK distributor Madison. Yes, you guessed it, the Havik is no more, done, kaput, Giro have decided to no longer make them. We have no idea why, but what we do know is that the metaphoric moths will be getting freed from the wallet and the virtual shopping basket loaded up with as many of these before they’re gone for good. Available in a range of colour and lens combinations, and packaged up with a cloth sleeve for lens cleaning, we couldn’t recommend these much more if we really, really tried could we?
