Cervelo Wins the 2025 Kona Bike Count

Cervelo took top honors at the women’s 2025 IRONMAN World Championship bike count, with 328 women choosing to ride their bike for tomorrow’s race. It was a tight battle for the runner-up position between Canyon (the preferred choice of riders at this year’s race in Nice) and Trek. Ultimately, Canyon narrowly took the silver medal.

Quintana Roo continued its strong sales run, the only other brand outside of the top 3 that managed to have more than 100 riders on board, with 132 riders. Even combining LIV, Giant, and CADEX together as a single manufacturer, they could not break past the century mark, with a total of 92 bikes.

The common denominator out of the top eight brands this year? All of them have had significant focus on the North American triathlon market over the past half decade or so (Specialized and Felt narrowly get grandfathered into that metric). With just over 35% of the field coming from North America, that isn’t surprising, although German athletes do represent 12.5% of the race on its own; that likely comes out in the counts for Canyon, BMC, and Cube.

Here are the full table of results from this year’s count.

Aerobars

Unsurprisingly, Profile Design continues to lap the field, with nearly a third of bikes featuring PD’s bars. Roughly three quarters of the Trek’s in the field all have house brand bar set-ups, accounting for the strong second place showing for Bontrager. That’s a strong contrast from Canyon, where about a quarter of their bikes ride Canyon-branded bars.

Drivetrain

It’s a Shimano landslide, with two-thirds of the field equipped with Shimano components. SRAM has seemingly consolidated its second place position, with just a handful of athletes choosing other cranks or derailleur options.

Helmets

This is one of the more shocking results from this year’s race, as athletes chose a road helmet for Kona over an aero one in a near two to one margin. (Perhaps Taylor Knibb is vindicated in her road helmet selection now).

Front Hydration Systems

Profile Design narrowly edged X-Lab for the top count on women’s bikes. More of those PD Designs were the older, more vertical Aero Drink system, as opposed to the horizontally mounted bottles that have become more prevalent in recent years.

Rear Hydration Systems

Athletes have come to rely on X-Lab for rear hydration needs, and this year was no exception. The Gorilla cage and the even stronger Gorilla XT were incredibly common sights.

In the other column does sit the EZ Gains mounting system. We will likely need to separate them out for 2026 (and make a determination as to how to count those systems in their entirety going forward).

Pedals

Shimano remains the most popular individual brand choice for pedals. However, things get murkier when you see Assioma and Garmin — some of those pedals fit Shimano’s or Look’s standards. That said, pedal power is proving popular with the women’s field, as it represents a third of riders.

Power Meters

Quarq narrowly takes the win in power meters.

Saddles

ISM continues its dominant run, picking up another win here in Kona. Selle Italia is perhaps a surprising second place, given the single shape of saddle they offer for triathlon (the Watt). We did see almost half of the Trek’s in the field riding a Bontrager saddle.

Wheels

The other big surprise: DT Swiss swept the 2025 bike counts. DT Swiss had a comfortable win in Nice, and it can now add a Kona win, handily defeating Zipp in the counts. Zipp held a respectable second place. Continuing a trend, Bontrager was featured on almost half of the Trek bikes in the field; we’ll need to do more digging as it appears athletes are more likely to stick with OEM-spec offerings versus purchasing wheels as an “upgrade” to their rides.

Please NOTE that RESERVE ( another OEM spec ) was counted outside of our forum so they are listed at the bottom.

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