We'll look at both wheel size and wheel brand choice. First, wheel size.

The trend remains as it has been, 650c wheels continue to lose share. But it's not straight-line. Women tend to ride 650c-wheeled bikes 38.5% of the time, while among those women who ride steep, it's almost 50/50 (48.5% of steep-riding women choose bikes with the smaller wheels, the balance choose 700c).

Of course, it's not quite as necessary as it used to be for a person of smaller stature to find a way to fit aboard a 700c bike, as lower-profile armrests on today's aerobars allow front ends to be positioned lower to the ground. At the same time, fit problems still abound, which explains why steep-riding females ought, on paper, to be the most likely to choose 650c bikes, and indeed they are.

There is no change when one looks at American women versus the rest of the world. Forty-three who chose to ride steep configurations also chose bikes with 700c wheels, 41 chose 650c wheels.

As has been the case for many years, Zipp is still the wheel of choice for the majority of Hawaiian Ironman athletes. Mavic ranks second, and that's if you count Ksyrium SLs, which are not considered aero wheels per se. The second most popular brand of wheels that are strictly bought and chosen for their aero benefit appears to be HED. Reynolds follows, and then comes Bontrager but, as with Mavic, this includes certain wheels sold O.E. on bikes.

"Others" is a big category and includes Spinergy, Specialized, Campy, Easton, Cane Creek, Shimano, Rolf, Smolik, Lew, Ceepo and Lightweight. It also includes Xentis and Corima and these two brands are in fact that most prominently represented in the "Others" category. Since we did not count these "Others" individually, we don't know how closely Xentis and Corima came to leapfrogging Bontrager or Reynolds and making it into the top-5.

While we do not have a total on these we noted a surprising number (considering their cost) of Lightweights in the race.

KONA SURVEY CENTRAL