Standing at 6 feet 9 inches (205cm) tall, finding a bike to fit the NBA’s all-time top scorer (and cycling enthusiast) LeBron James was always going to be a challenge – too great a challenge, it seems, because the basketball legend has just had a fully custom Canyon Grizl gravel bike made for him, with 32-inch wheels and a huge 3XL reinforced frame.
As noted on road.cc’s live blog yesterday, a video of James riding a mysterious new Canyon appeared on his Instagram page earlier this week, which led to speculation over what he was riding. Canyon told us to sit tight for an announcement, and now the mystery has been revealed.
James’ involvement in Canyon goes back a few years, as his investment group took an equity stake in the German brand back in 2022. Collabs and initiatives have followed, and he’s been seen riding Canyons numerous times in public since, but this is the first fully ground-up bike made for the NBA legend to our knowledge.
We won’t name names, but sometimes custom bike projects from the big brands can appear a bit shallow, with a fancy custom paint job and little else going on. This project has a bit more going for it, as Canyon has hinted that what it learnt from creating a bike for a rider of James’ stature could even inform its engineering and design choices on stock bike models in the future.
Canyon’s lead gravel engineer, Wolfgang Kohl, said: “Creating this bike was not merely a case of taking the current frame design and making it bigger. 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.
“Every part we made for him taught us something we’ll use again. By testing with the fastest or strongest athletes in the world, we get critical feedback on rider feel for those at the more extreme ends of size and power dimensions. That feedback certainly informs and improves what we do for the more typical Canyon rider.”
As Kohl alludes to, making a bike for a big chap doesn’t just mean bolting on bigger wheels to a massive frame and “hoping for the best” (a frame with a whopping 64.2cm top tube, according to the geometry chart). There were also a number of structural reinforcements made, including a bespoke carbon layup to deal with the increased load from a rider of James’ size and power, custom thru-axles that have been CNC-machined with boost spacing, and an extra strong custom seat clamp.
James said on his latest social media post about the bike that he “rides big” with “big rims, big tyres”, and the presser also has this quote from him: “On most bikes I’ve ridden, I was aware of the bike, where it didn’t fit me, what I was working around.
“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.”
View this post on Instagram
A cyclist since he started riding to basketball practice as a youth, James met up with his former high school teammates that he calls ‘The Fab Five’ for a ride around his native Ohio as part of the promo for the bike.
We usually end new bike articles by telling you how much it costs and where you can buy it from (or not buy it from, if you don’t like how much it costs) – but this one is “neither a prototype nor a display model”, says Canyon, which means it ain’t for sale. Unless you have the funds and/or global celebrity status to convince Canyon to knock you up a giant custom bike too.
Here are the tech specs:
Drivetrain: SRAM Red AXS XPLR, 38T chainring, 10-46T cassette
Wheels: DT Swiss XR1700 32“
Tyres: Schwalbe G-ONE RX
Handlebar: Canyon Gravel Cockpit CP0039, 16 deg. flare
Frame size: 3XL
1 thought on ““Every part we made for him taught us something we’ll use again”: Canyon unveils custom Grizl gravel bike with 32″ wheels specially made for basketball legend LeBron James”
So good that a great man (literally) like LeBron enjoys something as down-to-earth as cycling. Tailwinds!