Sportful BodyFit Pro Bib Short Ltd

The main purpose of bib shorts is to provide comfort, and this is something Sportful's BodyFit Pro bib shorts do extremely well. A comfortable liner, great fit and load spreading bib straps earn these shorts a hearty recommendation.

BodyFit is the Italian clothing company's top-end range, and it's identical, save for the colours and logos, to the kit Saxo-Tinkoff wear. Therefore you know it's been proven at the highest and harshest level of the sport, good enough for the pros and good enough for us mere mortals with more modest cycling ambitions.

Great chamois

The liner, or chamois is the heart of the shorts. It's where a significant chunk of the money goes, and Sportful use their top-tier TCPro chamois. It's their poshest offering, to provide long distance comfort without the bulk. It achieves this with variable thickness, closed-cell urethane foam padding. It's 14mm thick at the sit bones region, and tapers down to 9mm along the mid to front central channel.

It is also dimpled which allows the chamois great flexibility to deform to shape, further increasing comfort.The chamois is attached to the main fabric of the shorts with a 'press-to-zero' edge, which creates a very smooth and almost seamless finish. Compared to similarly priced shorts, and even much more expensive shorts, it's a fantastically comfortable chamois. It's so slim where it needs to be, and just padded where you want it, so you don't have that baby nappy feel that some shorts have.

Construction

The shorts are made from Aeroflow Compress and Lycra Power with flatlock stitching with what is best described as a snug fit. The shorts provide a degree of compression so they really hug the contours of your body, with no ripples of excess fabric. There's a double layer of fabric at the leg openings which increases the compression, and, together with a thin band of silicone tape, keeps them firmly in place. I didn't experience them riding up my legs as can occur with some shorts.

Sportful have given these pro-level shorts interesting-looking bib straps. A wide elastic webbing material provides extremely good support and spreads the load evenly across the shoulders. They're very stretchy - toilet stops weren't a problem - and very robust, as you'd expect of a product designed for a professional racing team.

There's a race radio pocket that's so discreet I didn't even spot it at first. It's pretty useless for anything else, though you could squeeze a small MP3 player into there I suppose.

Comfort, both from the excellent chamois, the good fit, and the webbed straps, is at the highest end of the scale. From short blasts around the lanes to all-day cruises, to crit racing and commuting, these shorts provide incredible comfort.

Conclusion

They're one of the best bib shorts I've yet tested. In my mind they justify the price tag, because they're better performers than some of the much more expensive shorts available. And in the yellow they're bang on trend, if keeping up with trends is your thing. Don't' worry, two other colours, white and black, are also available if the yellow isn't doing it for you.

These are Sportful's top-end shorts, and are very much the same as the Saxo-Tinkoff team race in. Sportful are rightly proud of their involvement with professional road racing. It gets their products seen and tested at the highest level of the sport.

What does that mean for us? You get the same shorts, the same fabric, fit and cut as the Saxo-Tinkoff pros race in. If you want race-ready clothing, this is a good start. They aren't even that expensive, not compared to some of the other shorts that road.cc has reviewed this year. They tick all the boxes.

Verdict

Extremely comfortable shorts as raced by a professional cycling team.