Three days. That’s how long it took for the biggest name yet to follow Trek’s 32-inch prototype at the same venue. Trek and Scott aren’t actually the first World Cup teams on 32-inch wheels — Thömus-Maxon got there first back in June, when Alessandra Keller rode a 32-inch prototype to third place at the Lenzerheide Short Track, the first 32-inch bike to podium at a UCI World Cup. KTM and Cube both raced their own 32-inch prototypes at later World Cup rounds too. Scott unveiled a 32-inch Spark prototype at the Soldier Hollow World Cup in Midway, Utah, on September 19-20, 2026 — making it the largest brand to join the format after Trek, and betting in exactly the opposite direction Trek did three days earlier. Coverage landed fast across Escape Collective, off-road.cc, and Canadian Cycling Magazine, all within a day of each other.

Trek and Scott are now the two biggest brand names in World Cup XC to have 32-inch race bikes on record, joining Thömus-Maxon, KTM, and Cube, who raced 32-inch prototypes at World Cup rounds earlier this season. And the two biggest brands built theirs for opposite ends of the height chart.

Quick Take

What raced	Scott-SRAM’s 32-inch Spark prototype
Where/when	Soldier Hollow World Cup, Midway, Utah, September 19-20, 2026
Riders spotted on it	Filippo Colombo (6’0”) and Fabio Püntener (6’4”)
Frame size	XL
Fork	Prototype RockShox SID Ultimate Flight Attendant (no official page yet for the 32-inch version)
Suspension design	Hidden-shock layout intact, per reporting (no ground-up redesign)
Three days earlier	Trek raced its own 32-inch prototype at this same World Cup under 5’3” Evie Richards
Production confirmed?	No. No price, no release date, no confirmation it ever ships
Best for	Anyone tracking whether 32-inch wheels are a tall-rider format, a short-rider format, or both
Skip if	You want a bike you can actually buy right now

Wait, Didn’t We Just Cover This With Trek?

Yes. Two days before Scott’s bike showed up, Trek Factory Racing raced its own 32-inch prototype at this exact World Cup. The detail that mattered most wasn’t the fork or the frame. It was who was riding it. Evie Richards is 5’3”. That single data point undercut the assumption every 32-inch bike had been sold on up to that point: that bigger wheels are a tall-rider tool, full stop. (We laid out exactly where that tall-rider assumption came from — and the height threshold the format launched with — in our Trek writeup.)

Then Scott showed up on the exact same start line, running the exact opposite bet. Filippo Colombo is 6’0”. Fabio Püntener is 6’4”. Both sit comfortably inside (or above) the tall-rider zone the format launched with. According to reporting from Bikerumor’s earlier coverage of Scott’s Spark prototype program and confirmed again at Soldier Hollow, the bike runs on an XL frame. That’s not a company hedging on fit. That’s Scott building the bike the original 32-inch pitch was written for, while Trek was three days into proving the format also works for a racer nearly a foot shorter than Püntener.

Same World Cup, same weekend. Two flagship brands, and neither one agrees on who this format is actually for.

What’s Actually Bolted to the Bike

Reporting has been consistent across outlets on a few specific details:

1. Fork: A prototype RockShox SID Ultimate Flight Attendant, SRAM’s electronically auto-adjusting XC suspension platform, already spotted on Trek’s 32-inch bike days earlier. SRAM hasn’t published a page for the 32-inch version specifically; the link above is the standard production SID Ultimate Flight Attendant. Two competing frame brands, the same unreleased fork spec. We’ve covered Flight Attendant against Fox Live Valve on 29er bikes before; watching SRAM validate it on two different 32-inch chassis in the same week is new territory.
2. Suspension architecture: Scott kept the Spark’s signature hidden-shock design intact rather than redesigning around the bigger wheel, according to Pinkbike’s report from the World Cup pits. The shock orientation shifted to accommodate the bigger wheel’s packaging, but the concept (burying the shock inside the frame rather than exposing it) carried over.
3. Frame size: XL, confirmed across multiple outlets. At first glance the prototype reads smaller than that, purely because the 32-inch wheels make the frame-to-wheel ratio look different than riders are used to on a 29er.

Same pattern we flagged with Trek and with Ventum’s Leadville prototype back in August: the suspension engineering underneath these bikes is deliberately unremarkable. Nobody’s reinventing the pivot layout to fit the bigger wheel. The wheel size itself, and who it’s built for, is the actual story every time.

Why Two Brands Making Opposite Bets Is the Real News

If Scott had simply followed Trek’s lead and scaled a 32-inch bike down for a shorter rider, this would be a one-paragraph update: format gains a second brand, same thesis. That’s not what happened.

Scott built for the tall end. Trek built for the short end. Both brands did this at the same World Cup, in the same week, using variants of the same unreleased RockShox fork. That’s not two companies converging on an answer. It’s two companies running the format’s two most opposite fit theses in parallel, in public, at the level of racing where the results actually mean something.

Put it in a table and the disagreement gets sharper:

	Trek prototype	Scott prototype
Rider(s)	Evie Richards	Filippo Colombo, Fabio Püntener
Height	5’3”	6’0”, 6’4”
Frame size	Scaled down from the format’s tall-rider baseline	XL
Fit thesis	Bigger wheels can work under a shorter racer	Bigger wheels stay a tall-rider tool
Fork	Prototype RockShox SID Ultimate Flight Attendant	Same prototype fork
Shipping to customers?	No	No

Every row disagrees except the last one. Both brands trust the hardware enough to race it in public — neither one has told you whether the wheel size actually made either rider faster.

If anything, Scott and Trek pulling in opposite directions this visibly makes the “32-inch is a tall-rider format” framing we used back in February less settled, not more.

Did the 32-Inch Bikes Actually Matter for the Results?

Short answer: not enough to change who won. Martin Vidaurre (Specialized Factory Racing) took the men’s elite XCO in a sprint finish, and Martina Berta (Origine Racing) swept both the short track and XCO races on the women’s side at Soldier Hollow — the penultimate round of the UCI Mountain Bike World Series. Neither winner was on 32-inch wheels. Colombo, Püntener, and Richards were the story of the weekend’s tech coverage, not the podium.

A World Cup start line under a sponsored rider proves a brand trusts its prototype enough to race it in public. It doesn’t prove the wheel size wins races, and at Soldier Hollow, it didn’t.

Who Should Actually Care About This

32-inch format watchers. Two flagship XC brands, one World Cup weekend, opposite fit theses. That’s a faster split than the format has shown at any point since January’s UCI approval.

Anyone who read our Trek coverage and assumed the tall-rider framing was dead. It isn’t. Scott’s XL-frame build under two riders at 6’0” and 6’4” is a direct counterpoint sitting on the same start line as Richards.

Riders tracking the RockShox Flight Attendant rollout. Two competing 32-inch prototypes running variants of the same unreleased fork in one week says more about where SRAM is pointing its auto-suspension platform than either frame brand’s marketing does.

Who Should Skip This

Anyone shopping for a 32-inch bike today. Same as Trek’s bike: no confirmed price, no release date. Whether either prototype reaches production is still anyone’s guess. Treat both builds the same way, team-only until either brand says otherwise.

Riders who need 32-inch tire support right now. Maxxis is still effectively the only production tire option in this size, and a second prototype at a World Cup doesn’t change that math this year.

Anyone looking for proof the format is faster. Vidaurre and Berta won Soldier Hollow on standard wheels. That’s the most useful data point out of this weekend, and it cuts against the hype more than it supports it.

The Bottom Line

Trek scaled 32-inch wheels down to fit a 5’3” racer. Scott scaled the same wheel size up onto an XL frame for riders at 6’0” and 6’4”. Both happened at the same World Cup, three days apart, on prototypes running the same unreleased RockShox fork — and at Soldier Hollow, neither approach put a rider on the podium. That’s not the same as saying 32-inch wheels haven’t podiumed at all: Thömus-Maxon’s Alessandra Keller already has, back in June at Lenzerheide.

The format isn’t settling into a single fit story. Trek and Scott are just the two biggest brand names to join a split that Thömus-Maxon, KTM, and Cube started earlier this season, with most of the actual results still belonging to riders on wheels nobody’s debating. Watch the next round. If either bet starts showing up on a results sheet instead of just a start list, that’s when this stops being a tech story and starts being a racing one.

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Reporting sourced from Pinkbike, Escape Collective, off-road.cc, and Canadian Cycling Magazine. No test bike has been ridden by our team at time of publication.