Triathlon - Sprint CAAD9 Optimo 4

Hey,
I'm just getting into both road cycling and triathlons and as a result have begun to look at bikes. I expect I would use the bike mainly in triathlons and road races, but not be very concerned about beating others. Versatility was an important issue for me as I expect to do both shorter rides and probably some centuries. At this time, it's not clear to me what type of riding will grip me more, so versatility is definitely important. A few bikes in particular caught my eye, especially Cannondale's CAAD 8 Optimo 2, Optimo 1, and Sprint CAAD9 Optimo 4.

I've been able to find lots of information on their CAAD 8s, albeit often with very different components, but have had very little luck finding reviews, opinions, or even just biased-bashings.

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with this bike or last year's CAAD 8 model. The Sprint ones do come with clip-on aero bars and I was wondering if they are normally well suited for the frame or if they may put one in rather awkward positions, as I've been told sometimes is the case with clip-on aero bars on road frames.

I haven't yet found a store locally that has the bike at the moment so I haven't test rode it yet, but hopefully I will soon.

Thanks a ton,
Dean

I don't know anything about the Sprint but I do use my CAAD8 R1000 for Road Races, Crits, Tris and TT's, its the all everything do well bike.

For Tris and TTs I put on a set of Visin Tech TT bars, I swap them out quite frequently, takes about 10 minutes.

The key to putting TT bars on a road bike is something called the slam position, you can read all about it on Slowtwitch dot com. The basics are you need very short TT bars on a road bike becuase you are not as far forward as you would be on a tri/tt bike. To give you an idea, I am 6'2", all torso and use the medium Vision Tech bars and they come in Small/Medium/Large/X-Large. The first questions I would ask if I had a choice of shops would be to aks them how they would fit you with TT bars and see if they mumble or if they have a clue about it.

Good luck, I love my CAAD8, you'll hear very little negative about them.

I've had the Caad8 Optimo 1 for about 2 months and I'm happy with it. I have Profile Design T2 clip-ons and they're fine. The frame is a bit stiff but it's light and fast.