The Tallboy's short-short 430mm chainstays have +/- 10mm of rear axle adjustment to ensure riders of all sizes and styles feel equally at home. So, we've done the same here and mimicked our longer travel geometry to create a bike with a 65.5-degree head-angle, generous front center, and short-offset fork, something rarely seen on a bike of this ilk.Īnd, the radical thinking doesn't stop there. In reality though, when was the last time you ever throttled back on a fun trail because you weren't on a bigger bike?. Paired with a 130mm fork the new Tallboy becomes ever more appealing to riders who like to open it up.Īnd, the geometry: that's a big part of what's going on.Įstablished theory suggests shorter-travel bikes get ridden more slowly, therefore require steeper and more conservative geometries. But, because it shares the same engineering principles as our longest travel bikes, the progressive lower link-mounted shock feels equally at home doing cross-country as it does in extreme-country. It's the kind of bike that makes you sprint while going up, along, over, or down because of the maximum efficiency of the VPP design and responsive, lightweight chassis. But, coupled with a lower link-driven VPP suspension design, this is one giant leap for the Tallboy. Sure, 10mm more travel might only seem like one small step. With kick-ass lower-link VPP suspension, a streamlined design, the typical Santa Cruz refinement, and rather radical geometry, the Tallboy is back to being a genre-bending folk hero. The new 120mm Tallboy takes a leap further into what short-travel bikes really are capable of. If ever there was a gravity riders' XC bike, the Tallboy is it.

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