If he can tell how a bike will ride just by pushing it, why does he keep riding and testing? Words & Photography Chipps Whether you know Guy Kesteven through the thousands of bike and product tests he’s written over the last 25 years, his over-exaggerated ‘bike journo’ riding style, or the chest-cam YouTube persona of KesTV, you will have come across him many times, ‘Kes’ is simply too prolific for you not to have done. Whether it’s reviewing top flight carbon chi-chi bikes or agonising over whether laces are better than Velcro on a trail shoe, it appears that if it moves, Mr Kesteven has reviewed it for one of many, many publications over the years. He has, if not filled, then certainly borrowed, the shoes of revered magazine bike tester Steve Worland as the most prolific mountain bike product tester in the UK (if not the world). Yet Guy knowingly walks the line between industry-respected reviewer and the self-parody of ‘peak bike journo’ because if you’ve written, as he reckons, around ten million words of reviews, you’re going to come up with some clichés now and again. He’s ridden probably every suspension design, suspension fork and ‘next-level shifting experience’ that you can buy. The guy, pardon the pun, is a testing machine driven to insane amounts of workaholism for reasons he’s still not sure about. And yet he’s still not satisfied. Despite reckoning that he can tell the difference between the weight of different cassettes on near-identical bikes, he isn’t nearly done with bike testing yet. There’s just too much to do, in Guy’s opinion, for him to stop, or even slow down. Slowing down, he thinks, would be very dangerous for a highly strung, driven character...
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