Throughout the entire field, the number of those using pursuit bars as their "base bars" remained within a percentage point of last year's total. Just over 53% of the field were using these as opposed to mounting their clip-ons onto road or "drop" bars. Around 47% of all riders were also riding steep seat-angled bikes, and let us hope for the sake of consistency that all those riding steeply were riding with pursuit bars, and that the converse is true.

Pro riders tended to ride with pursuit bars slightly more often than did age-group athletes, 60% to 52.5%.

Syntace still leads, but it has dropped from 49.7% to 47% over the past year, while Profile Design bars were ridden by about 41% of the field compared to 38.5% last year. The rest of the field is still holding steady, with Scott, TTT, and Cinelli all having between 2.5% and 3.5% of the field. Then it's ITM and VisionTech, followed by Shiromoto and Cheetah (its bars are only on its bikes).

This year three out of every ten pros rode with one-piece aero bars. That corresponds with only 13% of the entire age-group field. Altogether, 12.8% of last year's field rode with one-piece bars, and this year the number increased to 15.8%, a fairly big jump when one considers how much of the field is just going to ride with what it's had on its bikes since the last time they needed new aero bars. Another way to illustrate this is to consider how many of these bikes have aero bars that are newer than 12 months old? Twenty percent of the field? Ten percent? Who knows? But if one takes a stab at, say, 15% of the field as having replaced its aero bars since last Kona, then of these 230 new aero bars 46 of them, or 20%, were one-piece bars. If only 10% of the bars in Kona were purchased within the past year then 30% of the new bars were one-piece bars. However you look at it, the switch to one-piece bars represents the steepest trend line in the handlebar category.