While we were in the Yeti Cycles booth checking out the all-new SB5+ bike, we also had the chance to see their new women’s model, called the Yeti SB5 Beti. Based upon the same design as the SB5, the women’s version is built with a lighter shock tune and female-specific contact points including the saddle, stem, bars and grips. The result is a better-fitting mountain bike for female mountain bikers, without necessarily going down the route of producing a different frame geometry. Santa Cruz also do this with their Juliana frames, and increasingly, we’re seeing brands like Specialized and Trek do the same for their full suspension trail bikes.
The Yeti SB5 Beti features all the same improvements applied to the unisex SB5, but with a lighter shock tune that is better suited to lighter female riders. For the complete bikes, further changes include the saddle, grips and bars to offer a more comfortable riding position.Best women’s specific name ever?You can get the SB5 Beti down to an X-Small size, which offers one of the lowest standover heights in its class. Otherwise, the frame is exactly the same as the unisex SB5, with new internal cable routing, the BOOST 148x12mm dropouts, and the Switch Infinity suspension design.Neat internal cable routing entry port at the head tube leads to a clever tube-in-tube design for simple routing.Also not new, but damn hot nonetheless is the Yeti ASR Beti. Super light full suspension race bike for those ladies who love technical XC and marathon racing.
With 23 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)
