LeBron James' Custom Canyon Grizl CF Gravel Bike with 32in Wheels

Canyon hasn’t just made a big bike for a big star. It has built an outlier. A Grizl CF gravel bike on 32in wheels, engineered specifically for LeBron James.

This isn’t a catalog frame stretched to fit the NBA giant. The project was designed and built in southern Germany, and Canyon’s lead gravel engineer, Wolfgang Kohl, is clear: scaling up the numbers on a geometry chart doesn’t cut it.

“The geometry might land in the right place, but the loads don't scale the way the dimensions do. Everything needed to get re-engineered or the bike simply wouldn't function as a responsive system to the rider,” he explains.

That’s the crux. At 6ft 9in, James doesn’t just need more reach and stack. He puts vastly different forces through a frame than an average rider. Canyon responded with a 3XL Grizl that goes well beyond a taller head tube and longer seatpost.

The frame uses a special carbon layup tailored to handle the extra load James will drive through it. The details follow the same logic: custom CNC‑machined thru-axles with wider Boost spacing, a bespoke seat clamp, and those headline-grabbing 32in wheels. This is a gravel bike built to feel normal for a very abnormal rider.

One of One – For Now

The sight of 32in wheels under a Canyon will ignite plenty of speculation. But the brand is already pouring cold water on any talk of a production run. Internally, the bike is described as “one of a kind”, even if it’s fully rideable and not some show-only mock-up.

Big wheels are having a moment in the R&D labs, not on showroom floors. Scott has already walked this path: its 32in prototypes carried Robin Gemperle to victory at the Unbound 2026 XL and took Cameron Jones through the shorter 200-mile Unbound course. When Scott unveiled those bikes, it stamped them clearly as “pure prototypes” with no intention of releasing them to the public.

BMC followed a similar route. Its athletes raced a 32in prototype at the Andorran round of the XC World Cup in July 2025, then the company shut the door on any near-term consumer version, telling BikeRadar it had no plans to bring a 32in bike to market.

So the pattern is clear. The big mainstream brands are willing to test the size at the sharp end of performance, but they’re treating 32in as a laboratory experiment, not a product line. For now, it’s the smaller bespoke builders who are prepared to commit and sell bikes around the outsized wheels.

Yet the tide is quietly turning.

Schwalbe publicly nailed its colours to the mast back in January, saying it is “fully convinced” by the 32in format and promising to release 32in tyres next year. James’ new Grizl already rolls on Schwalbe’s prototype 32in G-One RX rubber, another hint that the ecosystem around the size is starting to form.

Merida is moving in the same direction. Stephan Seitz confirmed in March that the company is actively developing both gravel and cross-country mountain bikes on 32in wheels. He went further, predicting that 32in will become the performance standard by the spring of next year.

If that call proves accurate, Canyon, Scott and BMC won’t be able to sit on the fence forever.

Built for the Tallest Riders

For now, though, it’s LeBron James who gets to enjoy the most advanced expression of the idea. The consensus inside the industry is that 32in wheels make the most sense for taller riders, where the larger diameter can finally match body proportions instead of forcing compromises.

James has lived those compromises his entire riding life.

“On most bikes I've ridden, I was aware of the bike, where it didn't fit me, what I was working around,” he says.

“This is the first one that I didn't have to think about. That's what I love most about riding. It's just you out there and everything else is gone.”

For a rider used to bending the game of basketball around his frame, Canyon has finally given him a bike that bends to him instead. If 32in really is the future, it might just be the tallest athletes who get there first.