32-inch Wheels for the 32nd Leadville Trail 100: Mike Woods' Ventum 32er Prototype

32” wheels for the 32nd edition of the Leadville 100?! Former WorldTour pro and SILCA athlete Mike Woods will be racing on Ventum’s wild 32-inch prototype. These bikes, ridden by a few other Ventum athletes, are setting the internet on fire. Oh, and what might these prototype 32" wheels be from?

Running a slammed negative-rise stem to handle the larger wheels, Woods gave us a close-up look at Ventum’s ambitious project. This prototype is their first mountain bike, designed specifically for high-speed, long-haul marathon races before hitting the market in early 2027.

The story behind it is pretty cool. Ventam actually started this project about three years ago as a fairly standard 120mm XC 29er. But halfway through, after looking at early testing data and reading the room, they made a pivotal call to go all-in on 32-inch wheels. 

They targeted iconic, fast-paced endurance races like Leadville, Cape Epic, and Moab Rocks, building a chassis that puts the rider deeper "between" the wheels. The result is a ride the brand and its athletes are finding to be stable, forgiving, and more intuitive in corners than you'd expect from the big hoops.

That said, fitting 32-inch wheels into a mountain bike frame wasn't exactly a walk in the park. The big wheel size combined with 120mm of travel jacks the front end way up, meaning riders have to run aggressive drop stems just to get a normal race cockpit height. 

On smaller frame sizes, tire clearance gets tight when the saddle is dropped, so Ventum (and likely anyone else building 32ers) will have to cap maximum dropper post lengths. To keep the back end snappy and stiff despite the extra length, they settled on a traditional horizontal flex-stay rear end.

Right now, the bike is in its late prototype stage and getting close to production. Naturally, the bigger wheels and tires add a bit of weight, but keeping the overall build as light as possible is still a priority. 

The front triangle is basically done and will be similar to what’s seen in the prototype phase, and now the team is just fine-tuning bottle cage mounts so larger frames can fit two bottles. In addition to the rear triangle is getting its final tweaks before being locked in. Tune into the race tomorrow to see how 32” wheels fare in the race across the sky.