IN BRIEF
According to the press release published by Canyon on 3 September, the brand has built a one-off Grizl CF for LeBron James, fitted with 32-inch wheels and designed around the basketball player’s frame, which the same text gives as 2.06 metres. According to that announcement, the custom gravel bike covered its first kilometres in Akron, the player’s home town. Canyon states that this 32-inch machine remains a one-off and that it is not for sale. The brand’s head gravel engineer says the exercise was not a matter of scaling up an existing frame but of redesigning one, and that the lessons learned are meant to feed into production bikes.
| Model | Canyon Grizl CF, one-off 3XL |
| Wheels | DT Swiss XR1700 32-inch |
| Top tube | 64.2 cm |
| Stack and reach | 680 mm / 470 mm (according to Cycling Weekly) |
| Wheelbase | 1,201 mm (according to Cycling Weekly) |
| Chainstays | 476 mm (according to Cycling Weekly) |
| Availability | None: Canyon announces a one-off |
The production Canyon Grizl, like most gravel bikes, stops well short of certain body sizes. At 2.06 metres according to the press release, LeBron James falls outside the usual size charts, and that is what the Koblenz-based brand set out to solve with a gravel bike built for him alone. The press release published on 3 September describes a one-off Grizl CF fitted with 32-inch wheels, a format that a handful of brands have been pushing for the past two seasons.
The 32-inch Canyon Grizl was redesigned, not scaled up
The received wisdom would be that a bike for a very tall rider is made by stretching the tubes. Wolfgang Kohl, head gravel engineer at Canyon, takes that apart: according to road.cc, « creating this bike wasn’t simply a case of taking the current frame design and making it bigger ». The same outlet notes, based on the geometry chart, a top tube of 64.2 cm — a figure no consumer catalogue lists.
Cycling Weekly details the rest of the figures: 680 mm of stack, 470 mm of reach, a 1,201 mm wheelbase and 476 mm chainstays. The wheels are DT Swiss XR1700 in 32-inch. In the press release, Wolfgang Kohl sums up the project: « This was a chance to build something truly innovative, and it took a whole development team to do it. »
First kilometres in Akron
According to the press release, the bike was ridden for the first time in Akron, the Ohio city where the player grew up. LeBron James, whom the press release describes as an « NBA star and Canyon investor », talks there about a relationship with cycling long held back by his height: « On most bikes I’ve ridden, I always felt like the bike didn’t quite fit me. This is the first time I haven’t had to think about it at all. »
Canyon states that this 32-inch bike will remain a one-off and that it is not for sale. For everyone else, the brand points to its Perfect Positioning System, the in-house tool that works out frame size from a few body measurements. Still, the exercise is not an isolated publicity stunt: the engineer says that every part made for this bike taught the team something, and that those lessons will find their way back into the bikes sold to the public.
