Stephane Tempier's Trek Supercaliber - Gallery

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Stephane Tempier is one of the world’s leading XC racers and a crucial member of the Trek Factory Racing team.

At the recent UCI mountain bike World Championships, Stephane competed on Trek’s dedicated XC lightweight race bike, the Supercaliber. Although it has less rear travel than most rivals, the Supercaliber offers outstanding efficiency.

With its Isostrut integrated sliding shock, the Supercaliber does without a conventional rear linkage, avoiding the additional weight and maintenance burden of bearings and mountain hardware.

Trek’s product team did exhaustive research to settle on the Supercaliber’s 60mm rear suspension value. When the bike launched in 2019, many thought it simply had too little rear travel to confidently descend technical terrain.

What Trek realized, was that wider rims and high-volume tires enabled a 29-inch wheel to have significantly better terrain absorption. The benefit of that created a margin for Trek to shorten the travel of its ultra-lightweight XC full suspension mountain bike, down to 60mm – without meaningfully compromising its ability to cope with rowdier terrain.

Stephane is quite a tall rider, at 1.83m and uses a size large Supercaliber. 

The Frenchman has some unique component and touchpoint choices with his bike. This is the result of a 15-year career racing competitive World Championship XC, dating back to his first silver medal at the Junior World Championships in Le Gets, back in 2004.

Although some might regard Stephane’s Supercaliber as having a touch too little rear travel for the increasingly technical descents on many new XC courses, the Trek Factory Racing team has proved this to be an incorrect perception.

Some of the notable components on Stephane’s bike include a -13° stem and Crank Brothers Candy 11 pedals. Where most XC competitors desire to ride the lightest available pedals, with a minimalist design, Stephane finds the larger cage of his Candy trail pedals handier than Eggbeaters.

With a larger structure supporting his weight, Stephane is more confident when descending on his Candy 11s. He can also find the pedal more intuitively if required to re-engage it, after accidentally unclipping, compared to the minimalist design of an Eggbeater XC pedal.