Cycling has a long, complicated relationship with weight. In a sport where every watt matters, and climbing is often king, power-to-weight ratio is an inescapable metric. In the fight against gravity, every extra kilogram costs precious watts. Just like the equipment used, riders strive to optimise their bodies for the demands of the terrain. Over the decades, that obsession has driven many athletes, men and women alike, into disordered eating, and the sport still struggles to draw the line between what\u2019s healthy and what yields the best performance.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, the culture is evolving. Today\u2019s top riders fuel smarter<\/a>, train more holistically<\/a>, and place greater value on mental and physical well-being<\/a>. But elite sport is rarely healthy, and body scrutiny is hard to escape. And when it comes to who gets scrutinised most, the burden is still far from equal, as this past week in France made painfully clear.<\/p>\n Pauline Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot <\/a>is one of the greatest athletes the sport of cycling has ever seen. Still just 33 years old, the Fran\u00e7aise holds 12 UCI Elite World Championship titles (15 if you include team events) across road, cyclocross, gravel and mountain bike disciplines. She\u2019s also the reigning Olympic cross-country mountain bike champion. And as of yesterday, the winner of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift<\/a>.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Yet much of this past week\u2019s discourse wasn\u2019t about her performance, but rather, her appearance<\/a>.<\/p>\n After her spring campaign, in which she notably won Paris-Roubaix,<\/a> Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot largely disappeared from the races, pouring herself into her Tour de France preparation.<\/p>\n This race carried a lot of significance for her. As a young child growing up in France, Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot had wished she were a boy<\/a> so she could race the Tour de France. For most of her life, the race didn\u2019t exist for women. It wasn\u2019t until 2022, three years after she quit road racing, that a revived women\u2019s Tour de France <\/a>emerged. After winning nearly everything there was to win in the dirt, Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot returned to the pavement with one clear goal: to win the Tour de France Femmes <\/a>within 2-3 years. The 2025 edition was supposed to be merely a \u201ctest run\u201d<\/a> yet she trained as if it were her only shot.<\/p>\n Like her male teammates Jonas Vingegaard<\/a>, Sepp Kuss<\/a> and the like, Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot used every resource the Visma – Lease a Bike team made available to her. Altitude camps, performance labs, precise nutrition and guidance from sports scientists, coaches and nutritionists. She even bought a home in Andorra for easier access to big climbs.<\/p>\n She and her team left no stone unturned to tune her body for the Tour\u2019s brutal mountain stages and the infamous Col de la Madeleine <\/a>specifically. And yes, that meant losing weight. Four kilograms to be exact.<\/p>\n \u201cFor this race I knew I had to climb for one-and-a-half hours over the Col de la Madeleine and I tried to make the most of it,\u201d she told the press. \u201cYou need to adapt to the terrain you have.\u201d She added that she\u2019d carried more weight in spring because she needed \u201cpower on the flats.\u201d<\/p>\n When she remerged in the peloton on July 26 for the opening stage of the 2025 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, she looked leaner, and yes, skinnier, than ever. Fans, competitors and media were quick to take note. In turn, Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot addressed the questions and concerns with frankness.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s my job to be the best as possible,\u201d Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot said. \u201cWe know this is an endurance sport, and to climb you need to have a [high] watts per kilogram. I made the choice. I worked hard for it.\u201d<\/p>\n She was also quick to note that this peak-performance physique was temporary.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t want to stay like this,\u201d she said. \u201cBut we also had a good plan with the team\u2019s nutritionist and everything is in control. I didn\u2019t do anything extreme and I still had power left after nine days of racing.\u201d<\/p>\n Whether her approach was commendable or not is up for debate. But it certainly wasn\u2019t anything unusual. Vingegaard undergoes similar altitude camps<\/a>, closely managed lean-outs, and rigorous performance targeting. Tadej Poga\u010dar<\/a>, too, has spoken about managing weight through training and the off-season. Yet during their three weeks of racing in July, neither man faced even half the public scrutiny Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot received this week.<\/p>\n Her weight loss was splashed across newspaper pages, debated on TV panels, criticised on social media. \u201cShe\u2019s too skinny.\u201d \u201cThis isn\u2019t healthy.\u201d \u201cA bad example for young girls.\u201d Some even accused her of promoting disordered eating, despite the fact that her preparation was medically supervised. All this body commentary cast a shadow over a golden performance.<\/p>\n Sure, male cyclists\u2019 bodies are scrutinised too, but less often and differently. Society tends to treat male performance optimisation as purely athletic. A female athlete\u2019s weight, by contrast, becomes a matter of public concern, moral judgment, even policing.<\/p>\n So what did Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot do that was so different from any other elite athlete tuning their body for peak performance? She did it as a woman. That gendered lens, the comments, the coded concern, the casual critique, tells us more about us than it does about her. It’s a glaring double standard.<\/p>\n Yes, we should always scrutinise our sport and ensure athlete well-being comes first. We must emphasise also that the questionable measures taken at the top level are highly event- and rider-specific and done in a controlled environment; it’s not something for amateurs to emulate. And that\u2019s precisely why Ferrand\u2011Pr\u00e9vot\u2019s transparency should be commended, not condemned. There are real concerns about athlete well-being in endurance sport, and undoubtedly, cycling has long had a weight obsession, but that weight is not hers alone to carry.<\/p>\n This week, the world should be talking about Ferrand\u2011Pr\u00e9vot\u2019s tactical brilliance on the Col de la Madeleine<\/a>, her searing solo into Ch\u00e2tel<\/a>, and her historic victory. Let\u2019s not diminish it by reducing her to a body.<\/p>\n If we\u2019re going to question Ferrand\u2011Pr\u00e9vot, we must question every man in the mountains the same way. Until then, let her be legendary.<\/p>\n Explore More<\/p>\n