It’s official. Mountain bikes are now on the bike app.
To inaugurate this, let’s do a Bike Fit Analysis of arguably one of the most earth shattering performances produced on a mountain bike.
I’m talking about the mythical Leadville 100 mountain bike race.
In this article I will dissect and analyze the bike position of the 2023 winner and record holder, Keegan Swenson.
The Rider
According to google, the 30 year old stands at a height of 178cm (5”10’).
The Bike
The bike ridden by the Utah native was a Santa Cruz Highball. I haven’t managed to find a source on the exact size, so here’s what I did.
First I took a look at the Santa Cruz bike size chart by height.
Unfortunately, Swenson’s height lands exactly in between Medium and Large.
Since pro riders often like to size down, I assumed he was riding the Blur in size medium. However, I did some digging just to be sure.
To my surprise, I found out that Swenson actually rides a size small (52) Stigmate gravel bike, which is 2 sizes down the santa cruz recommendations.
This was surprising, but also a little confusing since I now had 3 potential sizes to validate (sm, md, lg)...
As you can see bellow, when I uploaded a couple of race photos, in the bikefit analyzer app, the medium was the the most likely candidate.
Results
Luckily, the Lifetime Grand Prix race organization put out some amazing race footage on youtube. From that I was able to extract a few screenshots that I could upload in the Bikefit Simulator.
Results
Discussion
It’s worth mentioning that Keegan spend most of the time on paved road in a “time trial” position with his elbows resting on the bar.
This aerodynamic position likely played a role in establishing the new course record.
Unfortunately, the app doesn’t yet allow to position the avatar’s elbow in this exact position, however, we can observe that this position brought the rider’s hips way forward.
In this position, Swenson effective Seat Angle was estimated at 87°, which is pretty much right over the bottom bracket.
It would be interesting to revisit this specific position if this kind of position ever gets implemented in the bikefit analyzer on the bike app.
