Fizik Aliante Large

Introducing the only carbon fiber thing Analog Cycles sells. All of the vital bits are not carbon. The carbon bit is a section in the middle of the saddle, the part where your body doesn’t actually impose any pressure. You could break it there, but I’ve never seen a saddle fail in that way.

The Aliante large is just the widest Aliante. It’s not super wide, but it’s about the same width as a Brooks Cambium. That means its good for mountain bikes, road-ish bikes where the bars are level or just barely higher than the saddle, fast commuter bikes, that sort of thing.

Fizik developed a faux leather called microtex a while back. They use this material in their shoes, bar tape, and saddles. The Aliante is covered mostly in microtex. There’s a weird shiny, partially dimpled patch of fabric on it too, which maybe looks better in person than it does in photos. The dimples are speed dimples, the same ones that golf balls and Zipp rims have. They’re put on the fabric to make your butt feel faster. Not really. You can’t feel them, and they exist just because some guy in a cubicle thought maybe they should. Maybe he was a golfer. Maybe he wanted a saddle that matched his Zipp rims. Hard sayin’.

The saddle rails are made of Kium, which is a made up word that means ‘steel’. Strong enough for big riders to mountain bike with.

The world is strewn with saddles designed by psychotic sadists:

‘Let’s design a saddle that just hurts to look at’, ‘I have an idea: let’s make a saddle that takes pressure off your soft tissue bits but makes everything else wish it was numb!’, ‘We should make a saddle that’s like sitting on a hatchet, but more costly!’, ‘Let’s make a saddle that looks like a Manta Ray, and feels like riding a disgruntled goat!’. These are some conversations heard in board rooms at saddle manufacturers.*

Good saddles usually have a few shared features:

• A saddle shape. By that I mean a horse saddle. The nose and the back are higher, and the middle bit is dipped, so you don’t have pressure. See: Brooks B-17, WTB SST, and the Aliante. Not too many others…
• Wide enough to support your sit bones. Most saddles are so narrow that your sit bones actually are just touching the edges of the saddle, sort of drooping over the edges like Dali’s melting time pieces. This ‘phenomenon’ is compounded when your bars are higher. Your sit bone contact point spreads wider as you sit up more.
• They don’t break. I’ve snapped other saddles in half before. Broken rails, busted the rail out of it’s socket, bent rails, etc. Good saddles can break, but it’s rare.
• Flat sit bone area. Really, the king of this is the B17 and the discontinued SST, but all good saddles are flattish across the back.
• They break in. In the case of the Aliante, the high quality foam eventually breaks in a little to your sit bone shape.

*I haven’t heard these conversations per se, but judging from the saddles on the market, these words are clearly being spoken.