This year's edition of the survey marked the first time––so it has appeared to me––that things have reached a point of relative stasis. We've been looking at bike companies, seat angles, frame materials, wheel sizes, since 1992, and for the first few years things changed dramatically. Most of the bikes were steel back then, believe it or not. More than four-fifths of the bikes had 700c wheels, most saddles were well behind the bottom bracket, and Trek ruled the roost, with '80's holdovers like Vitus and Centurion still among the top bikes in the race. Things were changing pretty dramatically each year, we saw titanium take a big leap forward, so did bikes with cantilevered saddles, most notably Softride and Zipp. Saddles started to move forward, wheels got smaller.

By 1995, though, things started to stabilize. Since that time the top seven bike companies have remained the top seven, and inside this list companies one through three have stayed in the top three (except for a Softride climb into the number three spot in 1996), spots four and five have swapped spots, and six and seven have flip-flopped. Had Answer stayed the course with Felt, this company might have been a contender for the top seven. But companies like Zipp, Specialized (with seventy bikes in the race in the early '90's), Klein have given way to these remaining companies, who are now, after four consecutive years, probably anchored here for a good while to come.

Titanium made a big leap in the early '90's, and it seemed like this frame material was headed for a significant market share. The past four years, though, have seen this material stay between nine and eleven percent. Carbon spiked in '93 and '94, and it seemed this would be the #1 material for some time to come. But the introduction of Easton's #7005 road tubeset along with Musing and Principia making aluminum very popular throughout Europe has taken the wind out of carbon bike makers' sails, at least for the rest of this decade. Aluminum's steady rise from a third to just over half the bikes in the race in the last four years mirrors carbon's decline by the same amount. Even Trek has replaced several carbon models (2300, 2500) with aluminum framesets.

There are only so many people, it seems, who are interested in riding with the "newer" tri geometry that has become popular in the '90's. About half the riders in the Ironman choose 700c wheels, the other half choose dual 26", and that is the way it has been for the past three years. Likewise, roughly two out of three choose a steeper seat angle, meaning 76 degrees or steeper. This increases to about three-fourths of the field when you get to the better pros. This is also subject to continent of origin. Europeans, especially German speaking athletes, almost exclusively tend toward steep angles, and usually dual 650c. So do Japanese. North Americans are about split on both the angles and the wheels. Australians are even less likely to ride a smaller wheel. The above trend is exemplified by Chris Legh and Peter Reid, Oz and North American respectively, who ride 700c wheels and slacker seat angles (although Reid has a turned around Control Tech post on his Specialized); and Thomas Hellreigel, Jurgen Zack, and Spencer Smith, who all ride dual 650c and at roughly 78 degrees of relative seat angle.

We've been doing this survey for seven years, and we've seen some very significant changes in the choices athletes have made during that time. But it seems we've reached a point of stasis, and I think it is going to be less meaningful to continue to chart the same parameters at this race. Therefore, this was likely to be our last year surveying bikes at the Hawaiian Ironman. We will probably continue to survey bikes, and other athlete choices and trends, in the future, either at other races or though other survey techniques.