Discover Famutm’s 32 Inch Wheel Performance at Leadville
Every wheel size mountain biking has ever adopted sounded ridiculous before it worked. Twenty-nine inch wheels were “monster truck tires” for a decade before they quietly became the standard nearly every cross-country bike on earth now rolls on. Twenty-seven five was supposed to be a marketing compromise nobody asked for, right up until it wasn’t. The 32-inch wheel spent the last year and a half in that same uncertain stretch, more thought experiment than proven quantity. This past Saturday, at the Leadville Trail 100, it got its first real test against a stacked field, and it held up better than a lot of people expected.
Late the Sunday before the race, Ventum Bikes, a Utah brand that has spent its entire existence building road, triathlon, time trial, and gravel bikes, posted four dark, moody photos of a full suspension mountain bike to Instagram. Black frame, black background, dirt still crusted on the down tube. The caption read four words: “We’ll see you in Leadville.” Ventum had never built a mountain bike before. Not a hardtail, not anything. Its first attempt showed up with a wheel size that had yet to win anything meaningful, at altitude, on a hundred-mile course, against a field of professionals who have built entire careers on 29ers.
It turned out Ventum wasn’t just showing up to tease a prototype in the pits. It brought three of its sponsored athletes to actually race it.
Who Rode What, and How They Did
Zach Calton, a Ventum veteran with a top ten at Leadville the year before, piloted one of the 32-inch prototypes to 11th place in the elite men’s field, a strong result in a race that came down to a sprint finish between the top four. Michael Woods, the former WorldTour road pro making his first-ever mountain bike start, finished 14th in 5:35:12 on his own 32-inch Ventum, a result he and Cycling Canada will likely file under successful altitude prep ahead of the road world championships in Montreal next month. In the women’s field, Ventum’s Emma Langley also crossed the line 14th on her prototype, running a different fork sponsor than her teammates in a build still short of full standardization across the team.
None of the three riders threatened the podium. Keegan Swenson won his sixth Leadville title in a photo-close sprint over Matthew Wilson, both credited with the same 5:20:26, and every rider on the overall podium in both fields was on a conventional 29er. But a debut prototype, on a brand-new full suspension platform, from a company that did not have a mountain bike on the market a week earlier, landing two riders inside the top 15 of the men’s field and one inside the top 15 of the women’s, is a considerably stronger showing than most first outings for a new wheel standard get.
Calton, for his part, sounded convinced. Describing the Columbine descent, the technical high point of the day, he said simply, “I felt like I had extra grip and more confidence in general.” Woods, asked beforehand whether the course intimidated him, downplayed it, calling the race “not that technical of a course.” Whether that assessment shaped how the bigger wheel performed for him or simply reflected his road background is hard to untangle from a single result, but it fits the broader case for 32-inch wheels at Leadville specifically: this is a course built for sustained effort over rolling and open terrain, not tight technical maneuvering, which is exactly the condition under which a taller wheel’s reduced rolling resistance should matter most and its added rotational mass should matter least.
Why This Result Actually Means Something
Leadville was not the first real-world test of the 32-inch wheel this season. Scott brought its own 32-inch prototype to Unbound Gravel earlier this year, where Robin Gemperle won the XL category outright and Cam Jones finished inside the top ten. Ventum’s showing extends that pattern to a second marquee American endurance race and does it with a bike that, unlike Scott’s one-off, is reportedly close enough to production that Ventum is targeting an early 2027 market launch. That distinction matters. A brand willing to put a date on retail availability is making a very different bet than one testing a concept car.
It also matters that Ventum did not simply strap 32-inch wheels onto an existing 29er platform. According to the brand, the project began three years ago as a conventional 120mm-travel XC 29er before the team pivoted mid-development toward the bigger wheel after reviewing early testing data. That is a company reworking its fundamental assumptions partway through, which is a more expensive and more convincing signal of belief than a marketing tease would be on its own.
None of this settles the argument. Three top-15 finishes out of a field stacked with professionals racing conventional wheels is a promising data point, not a verdict. The fork situation remains genuinely unresolved, with Langley’s bike running a still-unreleased Fox prototype while her teammates used an Intend inverted unit, a reminder that suspension compatibility for 32-inch wheels is still being built out in real time rather than bought off a shelf. And Leadville’s long, smooth, high-altitude profile is close to the best-case scenario for a bigger wheel’s advantages. Nobody has yet shown what a 32-inch full suspension bike does on tight, technical singletrack, which is precisely why Calton says he plans to race the same prototype at Park City’s Point to Point next month, a genuine backcountry course that will test the wheel size in conditions Leadville never asked of it.
What We Actually Know Now
Twenty-nine inch wheels needed a race like this one before they stopped being a punchline, a moment where the idea stopped being a pitch deck and started being a stopwatch. The 32-inch wheel just had its version of that moment, and it did not embarrass itself. It did not win, either. That is probably the right amount of progress for a wheel size that did not have a single race full suspension bike on a start line eighteen months ago. The next real test comes next month in Utah, on terrain that will not be nearly as forgiving.
