Project 32: One Man’s Quest to Understand 32-Inch Bikes

I can’t quite find the moment in my memory when I first heard that a storm was coming. A nor’easter from the southwest or something like that. It all sort of snuck up on me. Did the storm move in fast, or was I simply not paying attention to the horizon? The storm in question is not one of the afternoon thunderstorms that, on late summer days, frequent the Colorado Front Range where I live. As a matter of fact, one such refreshing and much-needed deluge is hitting as I write this. No, the storm I’m speaking of is simply a metaphor, and one that I’m not sure is strictly needed in the way that we need a few trillion gallons of water in these parts.

Thirty-two-inch wheels. Where did they come from? My field of view is pretty limited. More often than not, I have my head down at my desk dealing with the day-to-day bike business grind, or I’m out riding. I’d heard of large-wheel bikes over the years. Curve had some cool bikes that caught my eye. I had seen videos of people riding them up and down stairs and talking about how they simply roll over things better. A friend of mine has been making 32-inch jokes for a couple of years, demanding that my company develop and make one just for him. But what about the real history? I did some searching. I’m sure it’s not comprehensive, but here’s what I dug up.

Unicycles, Cruisers, and Giants

It seems 32” didn’t start with mountain biking. That wasn’t obvious to me, as most of the visible 32” bikes at this moment seem to be MTBs. A fair guess about where they came from might have been penny farthings, since that’s what every tired joke repeats in the comment sections. The genesis, rather, seems to be unicycling. Per usual, unicyclists were the true visionaries. Are we surprised? Thirty-six-inch rims have been in use on unicycles since the early 2000s, and 32” seems to have big-banged around 2010 or thereabouts. Feel free to correct me in the comments if I’m wrong—I’m not a real journalist. Cruisers played a hand. Dirty Sixer’s David Folch mentions a 36” Coker from 25 years back.

Black Sheep in Fort Collins did a lot of early work with the 36” ZAMer in 2009. In 2016, Focus Bikes ran an April Fools joke about the Big Bird 36, which got a healthy response. I guess these were the fish that were curious about walking out of the ocean and onto the beach? Or were they walking off the beach back into the ocean? Opinions vary. Leonard Zinn brought some seriousness to it. He’s always been into bikes that fit the rider’s height. Did you know that a 29er with a 5’10” rider scales proportionally to a 32er with a 6’6” rider? David Folch did that math.

In a sick twist of fate, Walmart was an early prophet of the genre, which I learned here on this very website. They sold a $229 32” cruiser in 2015. Mind blown. Cruisers are the answers to most of life’s questions. Less seemed to happen between 2016 and 2023, at least as far as my bandwidth as a researcher goes. There was curiosity about the spec, but good tires didn’t exist. Carl Decker cut and sewed two 27.5 tires together to make 32” tires for a custom Retrotec once upon a time.

Remember the 750d tire spec that sorta-kinda-tried to catch on between 2019 and a year or two ago? It was somewhere between 29” and 32”, meant for gravel racing. I don’t blame you if you never heard of it. WTB was shopping the idea around, and they made some wire-bead Nano 40 tires to demo the spec, which was probably a bad decision because the tires were pigs, the wheels were pigs, and, having ridden a steel test frame, I say the entire bike felt like a pig.

Tires and wheels can definitely hold trends and specs back. If 32” ends up being a thing that people like, and a thing that catches on due to merit, you might want to thank Maxxis for the push. In 2024 and 2025, they were early to market with the 32” Aspen ST. The Aspen ST was already a respected XC racing tire, and having a serious tire behind an emerging new spec standard definitely gave it the credibility that other efforts seemed to lack.

My history here isn’t totally complete, but it does show that something about big wheels has been in the water for over two decades, and probably longer.

Storm Sirens

As I mentioned, I had blissfully missed pretty much all of the big-wheel pre-history and building hype until late last year when I spoke on the phone at length with an industry insider with decades of experience and connections. He asked if we had a 32” in the works at Rodeo, and I told him we did not. He told me to get on it, because if we didn’t catch the wave and ride it, we’d be swamped and left behind. All the big brands were already on it, in terms of R&D, late last year. They all had nearly or fully mature products whose arrival was imminent and unavoidable. When their 32” bikes hit, the whole industry would have no choice but to follow.

I promptly set his advice aside because I generally don’t give any shits about what the industry is doing, to a fault. I’ve missed many valid tech advancements and been late to many industry standards simply because my first reaction to every new thing in the bike industry is to call it hype. Everything is hype, and everything can piss off.

That attitude cost me somewhere between $100,000 and $200,000 a few years back when we launched a bike that didn’t support UDH pretty much the night before UDH hit. It didn’t matter if UDH was good, or better, or something I wanted to avoid. UDH was inevitable, like Thanos, and by ignoring it, I paid dearly.

I started to realize that my contact in Taiwan wasn’t full of hot air when I spent exactly three hours at Sea Otter earlier this year. I walked the pre-open aisles and looked at the booths, noticing that both the chatter and the bikes getting attention seemed to have a high 32” quotient. Days later, as I read through show coverage in the media, it was plain that 32” was having a moment. Sure, there were plenty of concept and on-off bikes in the mix, but there were also production 32” bikes being announced, like the Salsa Fargo 32. Brands such as Mason, Superior, Mosaic, Sour, Neuhaus, Sklar, Revel, Ari, Baum, Rare Earth, Sage, Stoll, Van Rysel, Scott, Trek, and others were (are) hot on the trail, and many more are coming.

A year or two ago, there was a single pair of legit 32” tires on the market, and now there are at least 14 options, if not more. That number will probably triple in a year.

Immunoresponse

The wave hit, and Rodeo wasn’t riding it due to a cocktail of my own ignorance, arrogance, and idealism. Did I mention that I hate most new trends? I do. I cannot stand it when the bike industry dishes up steaming piles of hype meant to induce a buying frenzy in the masses. Stuff either works or it doesn’t, and a lot of time, we’re offered things that don’t work or make our riding experiences better in the guise of revolution, innovation, or progression. Right or wrong, my default reaction put 32” in that category, and I went straight to work in comment sections and social media, getting my jabs in at this newest industry spasm.

The retro-grouch is a bike industry trope. One that is both celebrated and reviled depending on which of the sport’s tribes you belong to. There is a certain nobility in opposing everything new that comes along in culture and society. In this moment of consumerism, tech, and AI, the retro-grouch or luddite might even be the zeitgeist. So many people share an unease about all this shiny newness and the great, bright synthetic future it promises to deliver. We’ve been burned before. Plastic fantastic. Teflon. Nuclear reactors. Social media. Asbestos. Everything is awesome until it makes us sick, and the backlash of that sickness is a deep mistrust of the very concept of newness or betterness. One could consider this an immune system reaction to the state of the world.

My immune system is on overdrive. My T-cells are primed for a fight. If you sell me something fake, I’ll tear it apart. But here’s the thing: Immune systems are awesome. They protect us. They keep us alive… right up to the moment when they go haywire and start attacking things that are fundamentally and deeply good, like peanut butter, gluten, cats, and pollen. Why are our bodies busy attacking pollen? Most life on Earth more or less depends on pollen being part of the mix.

My immune system attacked 32”, and that might have been the end of it had I not had a small remaining shred of curiosity and awareness left in me to counter with. As much as I hate hype, I’m also a curious person, and a curious cyclist. Soon after I returned from Sea Otter, I realized I had decided to hate something I had no experience with or knowledge of, and no right to judge. Even if I felt that I was likely to be right about 32” being a wave of hype, I owed it to myself and probably my company to investigate it more deeply.

Gathering Data

“Drew, we need to make a 32-inch prototype,” I announced at the office within a week of returning from California. This may have caught Drew off guard, but he’s used to my knee-jerk pronouncements after a decade of working together on Rodeo. I told Drew that we needed to decide, as a company, firsthand, what we believed about 32.

I wasn’t primarily interested in making a 32” MTB. I wanted to make a 32” gravel bike. I think 32” MTBs are being built, ridden, and discussed pretty widely these days. There is enough info out there for people to start processing and making informed opinions about them, including by making or buying (not buying) one for themselves. I wanted to build a gravel bike instead of an MTB because everything I had read suggested the positive attributes of 32” work best on gravel. We know that there are agility issues on 32” MTBs because, put simply, the larger wheel and altered geo just isn’t as intuitively nimble as a 29er.

Thirty-two-inch bikes can be a handful. Gravel bikes don’t need to be as nimble because they more or less go in fairly straight lines for a long time. Gravel bikes also tend to be used in endurance and ultra-endurance situations as much or more than MTBs do. A 100-mile gravel bike race is going to see more gains from 32” rollover efficiency than a shorter 25-50 mile MTB race.

What are the theoretical gains of a 32” wheel over a 29” wheel in an endurance situation? I had no idea, so I looked up testing data from John Karrasch, known online as FlexFitByJohn. John has been testing tire/wheel rolling resistance exhaustively using the Chung method for a while now. John has a nice database of results across tire sizes and brands. He also happens to have rolling resistance data of identical 29” and 32” tires, so he can compare the two sizes pretty much apples to apples. I asked John how much time a 160-pound rider putting out 200 watts over category 2 gravel would theoretically save in a 350-mile gravel race like Unbound XL. He crunched some numbers and showed me his math, landing at a not-meaningless 25-minute faster time on 32”. If you’re in the racing business, that’s not nothing. It also isn’t nothing that Robin Gemperle won Unbound XL on a 32” Scott gravel bike this year. There is no way to claim that the 32” is the reason he won, because he wins everything anyway, but results turn heads.

Many people on this website will never race a bike, and I myself am not a world-class bike racer. Speed and rolling resistance aren’t universally appealing, but I found the data interesting, and it made me want to experience the difference in wheel size for myself. We got to work quickly. Geo was developed, and designs were reviewed in 3D. I wanted to build the bike in-house, and we decided on a lugged titanium-and-carbon construction for it. We got the whole thing designed in about a month, took a deep look at it, then spent another month revising and tweaking it again. We didn’t want to make a rough-around-the-edges franken-bike; we wanted something with the thoughtfulness of a real product, even if we had no immediate intention of releasing it.

Lugs arrived. Tubes arrived. Glue arrived. We prepped, fabricated, and bonded. A frame took shape, and it looked pretty cool to my eyes. The official project name was simple and boring: Project 32. The informal name was Project Labradoodle, named after that polarizing dog breed that mixes Labrador retriever and poodle. Say what you want about Labradoodles, but if you’ve ever seen one run, they’re shockingly fast and surprisingly agile. If our 32 was to be any good, I wanted it to be like that. The nickname also acknowledged that many people would hate the bike no matter if it was good or bad, as people do with Labradoodles.

The Riding Begins

The bike’s first big test was the 350-kilometer Rift race in Iceland. Iceland’s “gravel” is very often far more rugged than typical American or European gravel. Conditions can range from fast and smooth to sandy, deep, rock-strewn, and straight-up jackhammer. That would be a perfect test case for a bike that promised to roll over things better, but alas it wasn’t to be, because the bike wasn’t ready in time. Instead, I first rode the bike to and from work on paved bike paths and streets. It was not an epic beginning to its story.

Still, for its first 150 miles of riding, roads weren’t the worst place to evaluate the P.32 because they let you feel the frame’s unmuddled handling characteristics and its overall stiffness and compliance. My conclusions from those rides were simple: It felt surprisingly like a normal bike. I could tell that I was sitting higher in the air, and that the whole thing was taller. It took more effort to swing my leg over the saddle. It was harder to straddle the bike at stoplights, my 6’2” frame with a 34” inseam barely clearing the top tube. Big picture, though, there was no big ah-ha sensation coming from the bike. It went where I told it, and I didn’t drop my friends on normal bikes. I didn’t feel faster. Thirty-two-inch bikes on pavement or mild terrain so far had been a big yawn.

Next up, I took the bike on a family weekend to some cabins about 30 miles northwest of Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I rode the bike on some singletrack trails in the area and halfway expected it to feel ill-suited to the task. Surprisingly, it felt totally fine. More interestingly, I hit some very rooted, technical sections of the trails and it really did feel like the bike took less effort and body English to roll over obstacles. By that I mean I felt a bit more emboldened to plow into things that would unsettle my other bikes, and the bike didn’t toss me. This felt like it had the potential to be a true benefit of the platform. Clearly, though, with less than 10 miles of singletrack on the ‘Doodle, I was only at the beginning of putting together an informed opinion.

After that, I rode the bike home from those Columbine cabins back to Denver. The route I plotted was 220 miles. From Columbine, it took buttery tarmac into Steamboat. From Steamboat, it headed out on paved and dirt country roads before climbing over Lynx Pass on gravel, then took Gore Pass and pavement into Kremmling. Next on tap were more gravel mountain backroads, some paved highways, dirt Cottonwood Pass, and pavement to Winter Park. The crux of the route was the gravel/mining road climb up and over Corona/Rollins Pass. Rollins has one of the most skull-rattling descents in Colorado, which can put a person on anything less than a full-suspension bike into a 15-mile hurt locker. The final 50 miles of the route are pavement to Denver.

For those intermediate, smooth-to-gravel miles, the bike performed very well. Again, it didn’t feel different from a normal gravel bike, but I did note that none of the washboard along the route got under my skin; I just cruised right over it. The climb up Corona Pass had some properly degraded dirt and rock, and I had no trouble with it, but then again, I’d never had much trouble on that climb either way. The most eye-opening moment of the ride was, of course, the brutal descent down the other side. It isn’t often that I dread a descent, but Rollins has that effect on me. To complicate things, I arrived at that point in the ride at about 7:30 p.m., and the light was fading fast. It was difficult to pick a proper line through the chunk.

It was at this point in the ride that the bike stood out from my half-dozen other descents of Rollins, all of which had been on rigid gravel bikes with tires from 40mm up to 2.25”. The descent required all of my focus, and I still hunted for those smooth lines through the rock gardens, but about two-thirds down the descent, I said to myself, “Wow, I’m making great progress. And this hasn’t been that bad!” David, who was riding with me on 29 x 2.25” tires, was close to my pace a lot of the time, but the longer the descent lasted, the more I tended to just coast away from him over and over. Again, I found this all interesting, but a 15-mile descent still wasn’t quite enough data to draw strong firsthand conclusions on the efficacy of a 32” wheeled machine.

Bigger and better challenges

Two weeks later, the bike’s true test arrived. I had been brewing for a couple of years on the idea of riding from one corner of Colorado to another, making a diagonal cut across the state in the process. The idea was simple, but the concept seemed interesting to me: one bike and one big diagonal line across every terrain type and every climate zone the state had to offer. There would be hundreds of miles of uneventful tarmac on the eastern plains, along with gravel farm roads. Upon arriving at the Front Range, there would be the smooth dirt of Waterton Canyon leading into the technical singletrack of Colorado Trail.

Beyond that were countless miles of everything: more gravel, more pavement, more singletrack. Paved roads up and down the Continental Divide. Technical singletrack in Buena Vista. Mining roads over Cumberland Pass. Long horizons past the Gunnison area, onto lonely vistas claimed by the Tour Divide. After Lake City would be the unrelenting gradients, surfaces, and altitude of Engineer Pass, leading into Silverton, Ophir, Lizard Head, Dolores, and the long, straight desert vistas on the way to Four Corners. Colorado does, in many ways, have it all when it comes to two-wheeled travel, and the Diagonal route was a perfect 670-mile, 5-day test for the P.32, not to mention its rider.

With the first 250 miles of the ride being mostly pavement, there again wasn’t much to glean from the bike. It went like any other bike. Washboards and gravel were easily passed through. Nothing stood out. Some of the straightaways out there were 20-30 miles long, so I wasn’t about to learn anything new about the bike’s agility, either. When we hit the Front Range and CT1, things got more interesting. Again, I expected the bike to feel clumsy in the singletrack, but it didn’t. Switchbacks weren’t an issue; tight turns weren’t an issue. I never “got rad” in any of that terrain, no butt hanging out back over the rear of the saddle. This was point-to-point endurance riding, not MTB shredding. The bike felt great. It didn’t rescue me from sections I typically had to hike a bike, either. Sometimes, you just have to push and walk no matter what. The bike felt smooth, but not to an added degree that matches the volume of the 32” hype that’s in the air these days.

It wasn’t until probably Cumberland Pass that signs of the bike’s benefits really started to emerge. Cumberland Pass is much like Rollins Pass on both sides: Chunky, eroded, and unwelcoming. It would be difficult enough to climb Cumberland on any bike, as it tops out at 12,034 feet, but when the rugged, rock-strewn 4WD road is constantly trying to throw you off line, the challenges compound. On this trip, I really didn’t have any issues getting up Cumberland other than enduring the protests of my tired legs and lungs. I didn’t have to focus much on my line; I just had to focus on the pedaling. Once again, the descent of the huge pass was eye-opening.

At the top, I regrouped with David on his 29” rigid drop-bar gravel bike with 2.2” tires, and then we started descending. Nearly instantly, I coasted away from David on the descent. I stopped and waited. Then I did it again, and again, and again, all the way down the mountain. Despite David being an overall better technical rider than me, I could not help but drop him every time we restarted the descent together. I just let go of the brakes, pointed the bike, and built speed quickly. Eventually, I tired of waiting and descended all the way to Pitkin, where I waited a while for him to finally appear. His body was fairly rattled from the very long, very chunky descent; mine simply wasn’t. This was notable. This wasn’t a question of one person pedaling up a hill faster than another. Rather, it was a question of two people coasting down a rocky mountain at very different speeds.

I filed this away as food for thought, and then the scenario repeated itself over Engineer Pass and Ophir Pass. Again, it wasn’t really material to try to compare the two bikes on the climbs. Different riders, different weights, different power outputs. But once we hit the descents, the gaps opened immediately. The 32 really likes chunky terrain. I don’t know what other conclusion to draw. Anyone who has any affinity for physics won’t be surprised by any of what I’m describing here. Of course, a bigger wheel can roll over bumps better than a smaller wheel. As obvious as that is, it’s another thing entirely to experience firsthand.

After the Diagonal was over, I had about 1,200 miles on the bike in a bit over a month of riding. The miles piled up quickly, and I was eager to gather more miles and keep building informed impressions. I had one more big ride slated for the year: Taurus Mountain Race in Türkiye. Taurus boasted a 900-mile distance and about 120,000 feet of climbing and descending. Originally, I planned to take my hardtail 29er to the race because I knew I needed suspension to tackle anything that big, especially with unknown terrain. But with the success of the P.32 at the Diagonal, I decided that I wanted to keep experimenting with the bike.

Just one problem: The 32 was a rigid gravel bike, and I needed suspension for Taurus. I reached out to Suntour because I had seen a 32” fork from them on a bike at Sea Otter. Was there any chance I could get a hold of one? It was a big ask in these early days of 32” forks, where the options are few and far between, and few forks have hit volume production. On top of that ask, I made a second ask: Would it be possible to make a custom short-travel version of the fork? My frame wasn’t suspension-corrected, and I didn’t want to affect the geo more than necessary. Amazingly, Suntour said yes and built me a custom pre-production Raidon 32” fork, mashed up with Axon internals, and with the travel shortened from 140mm to 70mm. With the fork secured, I had my steed for Taurus.

Anyone who pays attention to the ultra racing space already knows Taurus got cut short and canceled on day four because of extreme weather conditions and rider safety concerns. As such, I didn’t get my final 900-mile journey on the 32, but I did get nearly 400 total miles in from the race start to my arrival at the finish after about a week of extremely tough riding.

My findings at Taurus mirrored what I had already perceived in my other riding thus far: The bike excels in chunky conditions. On paved sections of the course, I often locked the front fork out, and more than a few times I forgot to open it back up for the off-road descents. Even when locked out, I constantly found myself passing other riders on descents and in rockier terrain, even when climbing.

Did the bike put me at the front of the race, in contention for the win? Definitely not! I just don’t have the DNA or the youth to aspire to those heights. But among my similarly paced peers out on the course, my passing-to-being-passed ratio was probably 90/10. When not oversleeping or stopped, my progress was always forward in the rankings. Was this all the bike? Was any of this the bike? This is nearly unknowable because I don’t have a direct clone of myself on a different bike to compare. That said, all of my perceivable inputs seem to point to the 32” bike being very well adapted and probably advantageous to long-distance multi-terrain riding.

After Taurus, as of this writing, I’m now sitting at 1,971.8 miles on the bike in about three months of riding. I feel like I’ve been through enough with this bike, and I get what this steed is all about, and I like this steed a lot. It’s a very capable, stable adventure platform that’s good at a lot of things and better than its 29” peers at a narrower range of things. The early 2026 immuno-sensitive version of myself would be so disappointed that I just typed that. Allergies be damned, I might like Labradoodles. They are a hypoallergenic breed, after all.

Conclusions and Reservations

So, is that it then? Is it settled? Is Rodeo going to rush a 32 to market and start telling everyone they need to buy a new bike so that all of their endurance dreams can come true? Not so fast. The more I rode this bike, the more certain I felt that this platform, while having merit, simply isn’t for everyone. Let’s look at some reasons why.

The big and obvious reason is proportions. At 6’2”, riding a 58cm frame, I still find the bike very tall. It’s awkward to get on and off of, so that saps some courage if you get into technical terrain that may require you to bail quickly. There’s no way around 32” bikes being big, and that is going to limit their appeal and their appropriateness for a lot of people. If I have a top tube bag strapped onto this bike, which I do a lot, I’m standing on my tiptoes and slightly crushing the top tube bag if I straddle the bike at stops. I quite dislike that feeling, so more often I completely unmount the bike every time I stop for any meaningful amount of time.

If you’re riding a 350-mile gravel race with stops few and far between, this nuisance may be worth it, but that’s not something a lot of riders will love in more casual riding. If you’re taller than me, then maybe this becomes less of an issue, but if you’re shorter than me, then this issue becomes more and more prominent as rider height decreases. The standover height issue is really just a small signal of a larger problem with the proportions of 32” bikes. Yes, maybe you can get fancy with geo and frame design to get shorter people fitted (shoehorned?) onto a 32” frame, but the smaller the frame size gets, the more compromises need to be made.

A second reason this bike isn’t for everyone: 32 is heavier across the board, simply because so much of the bike is (approximately) 10% bigger. The wheels are bigger, the tires are bigger, the spokes are longer, and the frame has more material. It all adds up. I spent a hefty sum on the super-light Berd Hawk Gold wheels for this bike to offset some of the additional rotational weight of 32, and it worked well. But am I about to tell riders en masse that we should all run out and buy bigger, heavier bikes and then immediately spend an additional $2,400 on lightweight hoops to offset the weight gains of said platform? To what end? I’m not trying to single out Berd wheels here; they’ve served me very well, but they’re a convenient example.

There will always be performance-oriented riders and equipment nerds willing to splash the table for marginal gains, but that isn’t a demographic whose needs map onto an entire industry and community. If the bike industry claims that it does, it’s lying.

A third reason I’m not all-in on 32 for everyone: Most of the time, you just don’t need it, and it won’t make most people’s riding experience meaningfully better. Yes, it improved my speed and even comfort on many occasions in the last three months, but there really aren’t that many people taking on such pursuits. Cycling is already a pretty small sport, and endurance and ultra cycling are microscopic inside of that already small sport.

Maybe the biggest reason that I’m not all-in on 32: There are millions of really awesome bikes already out there in the world, and there are very mature product ecosystems already built around those bikes. Think of touring the world on a 32 vs. on a 29. If you break a 32” wheel in Uganda, you’re out of luck. If you need to buy a 32” tube in Kyrgyzstan, you’re currently out of luck. If you’re running a 29, you can get parts pretty easily worldwide. It will be a long time, or never, before that is true of 32. Asking the entire world to adopt and support a new wheel specification that only benefits a small cross-section of riders is a non-starter. Even if the bike industry at large pushes 32 with every ounce of economic might it can muster, it’s like starting an old engine with carburetor cleaner: It might fire up and sound amazing for 30 seconds, but then it’s going to sputter and possibly die soon after.

When The Storm Does Hit

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what I think of 32. It’s a tropical storm in the Atlantic that will soon land as a hurricane. It can’t be stopped, for better or for worse. With that said, I’m dying to see what happens next. The industry has decided that 32 will make landfall soon. It will do everything it can to create a prevailing narrative that we all need it, and if we don’t have it, we’re missing out. Top brands will put top riders on the platform, and those top riders will win top races. Will they win because 32 is better, or will they win because top riders can win top races on nearly any bike? If the industry manages to permanently impact the prevailing narrative, 32 will be here to stay for nearly everyone. But the proof will be in the pudding. Everyone who tries 32 will run the same experiment I’ve been running on the Labradoodle for the last few months. When they ride the bike, will they love what they are riding? Will it make their cycling experience better? Will it make them faster, more competitive, more capable? Will people remember what wheel size they were riding that day or the sunset that they saw on the ride?

For some, there will be a true 32” product-purpose fit, akin to what I’ve experienced in some of my testing. For others, the regret will come quickly. They will have spent three, five, six, ten thousand dollars or more on a shiny new bike with 10% bigger wheels, and they will have pinned their hopes and dreams on the idea that the new rig will be a paradigm shift for the riding they love. For a subset of cyclists, I think the dream will come true, but for the majority, the dream will end in either indifference or disappointment.

Think: Fat bikes. Think: 650b. Think: 32. They all have something in common.

If Rodeo develops and releases a 32” product, we will not design it for every rider size and every riding purpose. If we develop and release a 32” bike, we won’t market it as better for everyone. We’ll explain the pros and cons, listen to each prospective customer’s goals, and try to guide them toward the wheel size and platform that best aligns with who they are as a cyclist. There is no one-size-fits-all in wheels or in life.

As for myself, my 32” journey isn’t over, but it’s on pause for a minute. Since returning from Türkiye, I haven’t taken the bike out of its travel bag or reassembled it. I don’t have any big endurance or point-to-point rides planned, so I don’t need the bike’s nuanced qualities right now. That day will come, though, and when it does, I know the Labradoodle will be a great tool for that occasion.

Until then, the only bike I’ve ridden since returning on either road or gravel is my tried-and-true 29er. It’s as great as it’s ever been, and if nothing else, the 32 has confirmed that. Whatever storm may come, my immune system is at peace.

Further Reading

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