Since he's arguably Kazakhstan's greatest cyclist and was both a star rider and the current GM of Team Astana, it's hard not to associate the team with Vinokourov. The man's riding style was dynamic, to say the least, and his spontaneous attacks and willingness to risk losing a race by not holding anything back won him a lot of fans. Vino rode by the seat of his pants, and the ups and downs of his career mean that the Giordana Men's FR-C Pro Astana Team Bib Shorts are some big pants to fill. For 2017, Astana has tweaked their kit to incorporate elements of the contemporary and the traditional. With the exception of the left leg cuff, Astana's 2017 bib shorts are pure tradition: a solid black field with sponsor branding distributed tastefully throughout. Tasteful is the key word here, as the shorts allot the proper amount of negative space to offset the sponsor call-outs. This lets the black shorts serve as a stark contrast to the brightly colored Astana jersey--a design choice that we've been missing ever since it virtually disappeared in the late '90s. Despite the obvious branding differences, the Astana Team Bibs are basically the same as the FormaRed Carbon (FR-C) model with one key difference: they're made to be printed on. Printing on for high-end materials is typically hard to impossible, but Giordana earned a reputation as one of the best cycling clothing companies in the world because it views "hard to impossible" as a challenge, not a limitation. Like Vino himself in countless suicide attacks, Giordana rose to the challenge, and the FR-C Pro bibs were born.