The UCI recently revealed that 32-inch wheels will be allowed in their events, including the World Cup races and the World Championships. So far, only a few companies have shown the public the 32-inch-wheeled mountain bikes that they have designed at this point.
The bike shown here is a 32-inch-wheeled Faction mountain bike that was made in Europe. It’s a full-suspension model that has been set up with the new Maxxis Aspen 32″ x 2.4″ mountain bike tires. It looks a lot like a bike with 29-inch wheels, but the downward-angled stem is the visual clue that this bike has 32-inch wheels. In order to keep the bars from being positioned too high, most makers of 32-inch-wheeled mountain bikes are offering the bikes with downward-angled stems to lower the handlebars to a better position for riders who are closer to average height.
We’re still waiting to see if any major bike companies will be releasing mountain bikes with the 32-inch wheel size. If the new, 32-inch wheel size catches on, we expect that the big bike companies such as Specialized, Trek, Giant and all the others will eventually begin offering models with the larger wheel size, but that hasn’t happened yet. We’ve heard rumors that four major bike brands will be offering mountain bikes with 32-inch wheels in 2026, but we haven’t seen any official news about that yet.
On October 31st, we revealed the news that an official at the UCI told Mountain Bike Action that 32-inch wheels will be allowed in the UCI’s mountain bike races:
Since then, that news has been widely reported by other mountain bike news sites.
Here’s a video we did of a test ride of a Black Sheep mountain bike with 32-inch wheels in 2021:
Here’s the review we did of that 32-inch wheeled mountain bike in 2021: