Men's 2024 Ironman World Championship Bike Count

While competitors at the men’s 2024 Ironman World Championship finished their carb-loading dinners and headed for an early bedtime, members of the triathlon industry were hard at work on everyone’s favorite race-eve tradition: the Kona Bike Count.

The annual tabulation, held at both the men’s and women’s Ironman World Championship races each year, yields the most comprehensive dataset available on the gear choices made by the fastest age-group triathletes in the world: Ironman World Championship Qualifiers. If you’ve wheeled through the transition area at an Ironman World Championship, you’ve probably spotted our team – armed with clipboards, tablets, and smartphone apps – peering at your bike frame, aerobars, wheels, pedals, power meters, and more.

Read on for the results of hours of hard work from members of the triathlon industry on the ground in Kona and contextual analysis based on years of carefully archived bike count data history. Also, a big thank you to Slowtwitch for coordinating this year’s bike count!

And for further numbers-geeking fun, check out the Women’s 2024 Ironman World Championship Bike Count, conducted last month in Nice, France.

What is the Kona Bike Count?

The Ironman World Championship Bike Count has been a race-week tradition since 1992 and provides valuable insights into the question just about every triathlete has at some point: What’s the best bike gear for triathletes? Though there’s no one-size-fits all answer to this question (every triathlete has different preferences and needs), the Ironman World Championship Bike count gives us a big dataset to be able to say “this is what the fastest age-groupers in the world use.”

Bike count data also lets us see changing trends in gear. For example, Canyon was only a blip on the bike-count radar in 2016, with just 39 bikes – less than 2% of athletes – while Cervelo was the top bike of choice with almost 29% of athletes that year. Today, Canyon tops the men’s bike count with 21.01% (and 14% of the women’s), while Cervelo has 17% of the market for men and women.

It’s also interesting to see how pro tech trickles down to age-groupers – will we see the “cooling” aerobars on Patrick Lange’s bike become standard on everyday triathlon bike setups? Time will tell. But you can be sure we’ll document it if it happens.

2024 Ironman World Championship Kona Bike Count Results

Note: This year, counters only recorded data across categories on brands that are currently in business, and graphs below only display selected data, while the tables beneath each section give more detail. In many instances we do not show all data recorded on tables if brands didn’t meet a specific count threshold.

Bikes

For the first time on North American soil, Canyon has finally upset Cervelo as the top bike chosen by world championship participants. While Canyon first toppled Cervelo at the 2023 World Championship in Nice, some chalked that up to “the Euro factor.” Now it’s just “the Canyon factor,” as the German brand reigns supreme for both genders in 2024. Interestingly, Cervelo hasn’t lost a huge amount of share, in terms of raw numbers, but rather Canyon has gained with great speed (as other brands have either gone out of business, lost sales, and/or stopped sponsoring top pros).

Surprisingly, big brands like Trek and Specialized—the former of which have reduced their pro sponsorships and the latter doesn’t even make a tri bike anymore—aren’t losing much share at all. Another big surprise is the drop in Quintana Roo’s shares from a steady 8% in Nice 2024 with women and 11% in Kona 2023 with women. Here, a gender pattern (independent of continent) seems to be forming, as the Nice 2023 men’s numbers for the American brand were similarly sluggish. Three interesting movers from the back are Cadex, Ku, and Dimond—nontraditional, performance-focused tri-only brands that barely even made the list in previous years.

Helmets

This is the first time in recent memory that we’ve counted aero helmets versus road helmets, and while the line between the two is getting blurrier, the results are interesting nonetheless. If nothing else, the prevalence of long-tail aero helmets (i.e., helmets that are at least obviously “aero helmets”) is certainly smaller than you’d think at a world championship event with a rolling course. However, this also backs up recent research that recognizes the reality that most triathletes—even the best in the world—can’t hold a perfect aero position long (and steadily) enough to fully reap the rewards of that long tail.

Aerobars

While Profile Design has been taking a very slight dip in the last year—down from a recent high of 37% share in Kona 2023—it’s still holding steady with a huge lead over the second-largest aerobar choice of Ironman world championship participants. In Kona 2024, Profile has 25%, while Canyon steadily marches forward into the second brand spot with roughly 12% (up from 5% in Nice 2024 and a marginal 2% in Kona 2023). This is more of a signal of Canyon’s popularity as a bike brand, but it’s still notable.

Elsewhere, brands like Zipp, Cervelo, and Vision remain almost completely flat, while boutique brands like 51 Speedshop, Drag2Zero, and Sync are making huge gains from world champs to world champs—likely thanks to pro representation.

Components

Though components typically stay a fairly uninteresting affair at the bike count (think: Shimano as “late ‘00s Chrissie Wellington Ironman world champs”), Sram has finally made a big move at King Shimano. In previous years, Sram had remained a pretty flat 22% from Nice to Kona to Nice again, but at Kona 2024 Sram lept up a huge 8% in share to nearly 31%. In the zero-sum world of components, that also means Shimano has taken a huge hit from world championship participants, dropping below 70% for the first time in recent memory.

Wheels

Now that we have complete data on men and women in Nice and Kona, the fact that Zipp is king once again in Kona (after being dethroned in Nice this year and last year by DT Swiss) truly shows some regional preference. Most interestingly, this was Zipp’s largest share (28% of the total counted) in recent years, while DT Swiss actually had nearly the same share in Kona 2024 (21%) as they did in Nice this year.

Clearly DT Swiss—likely due to their OEM (original equipment manufacturer) presence on popular brands—is here to stay, but brands like Zipp, HED (in third with 8%, up from seventh in Nice 2024), and Enve (in fifth with 5%, up from 10th in Nice 2024) seem to show up more on bikes in Kona than they do in Nice. Bontrager seems to stay steady, regardless of world champs location (again, another likely causal OEM effect from Trek).

Pedals

Pedals are a category where there isn’t typically a lot of movement year over year, but they’re also a fascinating data set because there is zero OEM influence—no bikes come with pedals, so the pedal count is one of the few that isn’t affected by a bike brand’s popularity. Here, we see Shimano still sits on top, but is losing a few points in share from year to year. Look, however, gained some share versus Kona 2023, while Assioma has made big gains versus Kona 2023—both were statistically flat versus Nice 2023.

Saddles

We don’t have a ton of consistent recent data from world championship saddle counts, but the picture from the Kona 2024 count looks very similar to the Nice 2024 count—albeit with more Fizik and way less Specialized. ISM and Selle Italia are still on top with similar shares to the women’s world champs last month. Gebiomized and Dash seem to be the small-brand movers in the back of the pack—two very specialized aftermarket saddles that are more common (proportionally) on pro setups.

Front Hydration

Front hydration is a super interesting story over the last year, as integrated systems are taking off. Last year in Kona, integrated front hydration appeared on only 7% of Ironman World Championship age-grouup bikes, then in Nice 2024 almost 20% of racers had integrated systems. Now integrated front hydration systems have the majority of share, with 37%, while Profile Design still hangs strong with 33%. Meanwhile, XLab has taken a pretty big hit with world champ racers, dropping 18% since Kona in 2023, and both Giant and Speedfil are barely registering with counters.

Rear Hydration

Like front hydration, rear hydration has seen a trend toward integrated systems, but XLab still has the majority of share with 42% (though down from 52% in Nice 2024). Profile Design has also taken a big hit—likely from the increase in integrated systems—holding the number-two spot, but going from 30% in Nice this year to 22% in Kona 2024. Interestingly, Fizik has moved up quite a bit from Nice 2024.