There ought to be some cosmic law against publishing a saddle review. Saddles are highly subjective, like modern art. Or poetry. And, like a poem, a saddle doesn’t have a mechanical function. As Fausti Coppi once put it, “A saddle does not have to mean, but be.”

I suppose there are some rules to modern art or, at a minimum, such a thing as universally recognized bad art and bad poetry. Likewise with saddles. As Supreme Court Justice Jacques Anquetil once said, “I can’t define what makes a saddle obscene, but I know it when I sit on it.”

When it comes to the needs of a triathlete, you add an exclamation point to everything written above. The only thing worse than riding for four hours on a bad saddle is riding for four hours on a bad saddle in the aero position. Instead of feeliing like you’ve just gotten kicked in the butt by Shaquille O’Neal, it’s like he’s just kicked you somewhere else.

But I’ve written all this before.

I liked the Koobi Tri saddle. But I didn’t love it. This isn’t to say that you won’t love it. I think it depends on how you ride. The Koobi is a split-shell saddle, and it seems intuitive that one ought to ride directly on top of it. One’s taint (look elsewhere on Slowtwitch for the anatomy lesson) ought to set right in there, right? Don’t I have that right? Please correct me on our forum if I have that wrong.

I slide off one side of the saddle. I just can’t do it any differently. Having been an off-to-one-side guy for lo these many years I—like the 55-year-old laid-off steelworker—just might not be capable of adaptation. Even so, the Koobi’s ride was quite okay for me. A saddle must be fairly wide and flat across the top for me to like it—don’t ask me why—and the Koobi fits that bill. It must also have a lot of good-quality foam or gel in the nose. The Koobi has that. In fact it has both foam and gel.

My first ride on this saddle was four hours long, mostly spent in the aero position, and I was never in bad shape. If I was the type of guy who liked to drop right into a split-shell saddle I suspect this would’ve been my dream come true.

The Koobi is a first-class saddle. It uses hollow titanium tubes for its rails, and to the best of my knowledge the only other saddle to use these is the Selle Italia SLR. Very few factories worldwide can make a top-caliber saddle, and Selle Italia makes this one. No, Selle Italia has no ownership in Koobi, and the saddle, at between $100 and $125, would be less expensive if a lesser factory made it. But for now at least Selle Italia is the factory with which Koobi contracts.

There are three or four saddles I’ve ridden that would work for me, and that I would recommend to others. This is one of them, with the caveat that I’d like it better if I could ride it the way it was meant to be ridden. The determination of whether this is the best saddle for you would depend on how you ride the bike.

Koobi is a small Colorado-based company that reminds me a lot of Quintana Roo and Cervelo back in their early years. These guys seem to me to be good people, because I can tell in talking with them that they listen to their customers. As a result I suspect their already-good saddles will just continue to improve.