For anyone looking to get into road cycling, or upgrade from a very cheap first bike, Decathlon’s Triban RC 520 road bike could be a key contender. Listed in our guides to the best road bikes cycle budget road bikes and best women’s road bikes, this sub-£850 bike comes with an impressive build and won’t break the bank. Having used this bike as a long-termer and spent a significant amount of time riding many miles on it year-round, I’m here to break down exactly what you can expect to get if you choose this to be your first – or next – road bike.
Pros
+Good spec for the price
+Comfortable and relaxed geometry
+Hugely versatile
+Hybrid brakes for good stopping power and easy maintenance
Cons
-Heavy for a road bike
The Triban RC 520 Disc is a comfort-focused road bike, as opposed to the brand’s more racy Van Rysel range. This means a relaxed geometry, which puts you in a fairly upright riding position. It’s difficult to provide exact numbers since Decathlon provides zero geometry details on its website. This also makes it impossible to distinguish between the men’s and women’s models, as I don’t have access to both to compare side by side.
However, this shouldn’t be too much of an off-putting factor, as I imagine the majority of people looking at this particular bike will be new to the sport and therefore more likely to choose their bike size based on their height and inseam, rather than poring over geometry charts. For the record, I am 156cm tall with a 78cm inseam and am comfortably riding the XS model.
Setfieseep
Aesthetically the Triban RC 520 Disc is simple, if not a little bland, with its subtle but metallic dark blue paint, white lettering for the logo, small red-painted accents and all-black components. The aluminium frame is mated with a carbon fork to alleviate some of the weight, and overall it looks pleasant enough.
The frame comes with mounting points for mudguards and a rear rack, plus two bottle cages, which makes it a good option for year-round riding and potentially commuting. Meanwhile, the build is pretty great for the price point.
At £850 the Triban RC 520 Disc straddles the line between entry-level and mid-range for many people, and it comes complete with 11-speed Shimano 105 gearing and shifters, made possible with a bit of cost-cutting by using a non-series Shimano RS510 compact chainset, and a Microshift cassette. These offer 50/34 and 11/32 gearing, which is plenty wide enough for traversing most undulating landscapes. The lowest gear doesn’t quite reach a 1-to-1 gear ratio, but it’s low enough to cover most ascents, and part of the fun of investing in a new road bike is getting fitter and stronger with practice, right? Meanwhile, the 50/11 highest gear is enough to prevent spinning out on most descents, and the overall range of gears suits many different riding scenarios, making this quite a versatile bike.
Other specs include hybrid TRP HY/RD disc brakes, which provide an element of hydraulic stopping power combined with the simpler maintenance needs of cables. They’re quite unwieldy to look at, but their performance is well regarded and the Shimano-compatible brake pads mean spares are easily obtained. Elsewhere, tubeless-ready rims that can take up to 36mm wide tyres if you want to upgrade the stock 28mm Triban slick tyres, the women’s specific ergonomic saddle is comfortable – for me at least – and the Triban finishing kit is basic but perfectly up to the task.
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