ORE 9 RDO Gravel – ride where others dare not

The ORE 9 RDO is the gravel bike that goes where others won't. Gravel can be wild and untamed. Slivers of singletrack glint through tall grasses, utterly irresistible. Tracks traipse deep into darkened woods, daring you into unexplored unknowns. Niner has brought out the ORE 9 RDO to help you explore those unknowns.

Built for the rider who wants to go further, it comes with cross-country mountain bike geometry to help you on the roughest terrain, to go deep into the woods. ORE stands for Off Road Explorer. Meanwhile, RDO stands for Race Day Optimized, so the frame is carbon. Put them together and you get a bike built around a single premise, a mountain biker's gravel bike that takes you anywhere. It’s built and tested to the MTB ISO standard, so is ready for most things thrown at it, not just light gravel paths.

Now available in an ultraviolet colorway, with a SRAM Rival AXS 13-speed groupset, it looks good as well as performs well off-road. However, this performance does not come with a ridiculous price tag, with this model coming in at $5,299. The model with Shimano GRX 1x 12-speed gearing, in translucent green, is even more affordable, at $3,500 in the US, and £1,499 in the UK.

This is a bike prepared to head off-road. As riders choose ever-wider tyres to help them over rougher terrain, Niner’s ORE 9 RDO comes with clearance for 50mm 700c tyres, or 2-inch 650b models. It means there is little that this bike can’t take on, a real hybrid between XC mountain bikes and gravel offerings. You can check out more on Niner’s website, its Instagram page, or on Facebook. They’ve been making bikes since 2005, and have been at the forefront of the gravel wave.

The ORE 9 RDO didn't emerge from a design brief for a bikepacking bike or a fast-rolling race machine, instead coming out of a desire for a gravel bike that could do it all. Instead of giving a bike which needs suspension forks added to it, which doesn’t quite work on many, the ORE 9 RDO has been designed to work with it. Fit a fork with up to 40mm travel and you can have a more controlled ride on singletrack and more extreme gravel terrain and a suspension-adjusted ride position. Equally, if you don’t want to put a suspension fork on, it works just fine without it too.

It comes with a slack 69 degree head tube angle, a 70mm bottom brack drop, and 435mm chainstays, engineered with stability in mind. It can float up and over steep climbs and technical sections, then absolutely crush it on the descents. It's snappy and agile where you want it, but also composed and confident where you need it. Being made of carbon, and RDO, it is light and stiff enough to race when required, but not too harsh for an everyday ride. Niner stands by their RDO frames too, with lifetime warranty on them.

The UDH rear derailleur hanger allows for SRAM’s Full Mount rear derailleurs to be used, allowing either a mullet build with a T-Type MTB mech or a 13-speed build with SRAM Red XPLR AXS, as in the new flagship model. It means you can have road-width gearing on the front derailleur, and a MTB cassette on the back, giving you traction up the steepest climbs. The ORE 9 RDO also comes with a T47 bottom bracket, offering more drivetrain options, and adding more stiffness to the frame. The seatpost has a 27.2mm diameter, giving it compatibility with dropper posts, with internal routing too. If you want to make it even more MTB, you can.

If you want to take the bike further, on those long days in the saddle, there are mounts for a top tube bag, a frame bag, and two bottles too. It’s designed to be faster than your bikepacking machine, but that doesn’t mean it can’t, either.

The top-of-the-range bike, in that Ultraviolet colorway, comes with more than just a SRAM Rival AXS 13-speed wireless groupset paired with SRAM Rival XPLR AXS for the rear derailleur. It ships with a CREST S2 29 wheelset with 28 spokes, with Schwalbe G-One Performance 700x45 tyres with TLR and RaceGuard protection, a Niner Carbon seatpost, Niner Alloy handlebar, and a Niner RDO stem.

There are two more full builds: choose between a model with Shimano GRX 1x 12-speed with DT Swiss G1800 Spline wheels with Schwalbe G-One Allroad Evo Super Terrain 45mm tyres or a model with SRAM Apex XPLR 1x 12-speed with Niner alloy wheels and Schwalbe G-One Allround Performance Raceguard 40mm tyres. The former is priced at $5,229 (£3,499, €4,499), and the latter at $4,299 (£3,199, €3,999). It can be bought from dealers in the US, while in the UK and EU, it's direct-to-consumer.