So, this is a question sitting quietly in my mind in over the last couple of weeks following the TdF Femmes build up. I’ll caveat this by several things; 1, I’m a man… a man who could definitely do to lose a few kilos and also does not to any sort of elite racing although I fail repeatedly at decidedly, NOT elite racing. 2, I understand weight loss does different things to women than it does to men therefore has wider ranging ramifications for their immediate and future health.
That said…
It does, from the outside, feel like there’s a lot of body-talk around Pauline Ferrand-Prévot in this run up to the Tour which looks a lot like body shaming.
In men’s racing, nobody looks at Mads Pedersen/MvdP and thinks it’s normal they should be able to compete for the GC. Nobody looks at Froome and asks why he didn’t win more Ronde van Vlaanderens. In the modern era, we only have Pogačar who has the innate ability to win classics and grand tours.
There’s a lot of media before and during (and after) the TdFF trying to litigate whether PFP should have trained to the level she did in order to win the tour. Saying that she needs to balance her desire to win with the impression it will make on younger riders .That not every rider can be the same size or go to do an 80+ day training camp for the one race. Why is Pauline Ferrant-Prevot being held to a higher (probably impossible) standard than her colleagues? She’s delivered a tour win for the ages, both for France and for the women’s peloton. I happen to be in Paris and the pages of newspapers and TV stations are jubiliant about the win AND the manner of that win but the international cycling press is talking a lot about whether she’s too thin… irrespective of whether it’s men or women writing these articles.
Is it fair?
Edit - I should say I appreciate it’s an emotive issue, and I don’t want to upset anyone, but there seems to be some different standards… I assume that’s the reason for discussion fora
I was thinking a lot about this today. Let’s disconnect the specific circumstances or people involved here and take this as a hypothetical. We know that for SOME people, there will be something to be gained in pursuit of goals by being below their ‘healthy’ normal weight. Where w/kgs counts more, it’s can be easier to cut weight than to add watts. And maybe you can do both. I’m 80kg in my normal weight. If I cut out all my other activities that build upper body muscle, maybe I could get to 75. That’s a lot easier than adding another 25 watts of power.
What I doubt is that we can convince everyone in the pro peloton and the staff around them that they should all focus on healthy weight, natural weight, given the decidedly results-oriented nature of the sport. It seems like a truce unlikely to be sustainable. A rider will take the gains they can get if they’re on the margins or the top. How do you convince a top rider to ignore that potential gain when it could be the difference between winning and losing? A rider at the back of the peloton trying to make time cut? Sure, the messages sent are wrong, but it’s hard to expect that someone won’t take that opportunity when it can give results.
I don’t really know what you do, but I’m not sure that not talking about it or hoping everyone will just all play nice will work.
I think she should be able to train as she sees fit, but she should be aware of the impact of the example she’s setting and actively work to minimize the potential harm.
The problem is that her victory will be distilled to “She lost weight and won.” That’s a message that most people in women’s sports have been fighting for the past decade, and were just starting to see progress in the last couple of years. We don’t need coaches using that message on vulnerable athletes, or young girls starving themselves. There’s world of difference between an experienced elite athlete peaking for an event with a full team of coaches and nutritionists and a novice hoping that thin will be faster based on advice from TikTok videos.
Female athletes face the athletic pressure to be light and the social pressure to be thin and ‘hot’. If race-fit Jonathan Milan and Lorean Weibes were to walk down the street together only one of them would get insults about “chunky thighs”. The importance of looking good on social media hasn’t helped. Anything that adds more pressure to be thin is another source of stress.
I think a good step would be for PFP to schedule a long, detailed interview about balancing health and performance. She is a role model, and I think there is some obligation to try to use that power for good.
I heard about this today on the podcast. I have not yet read Abby’s article, but I plan to. What I took from Georgie and Matt’s discussion was (a) did PFP do too much to win and (b) did KN-P and DV not do enough to win? And I wondered if anyone ever asked Jonas if maybe he should have lost a few pounds before the TdF?
One of the things I did find a bit distressing is that Georgie reported that Demi said something to the effect that she’s “a bigger girl” than PFP. A bigger girl? Demi is NOT a big girl. But she is taller, and carries a bit more weight. I’m guessing body fat percentage borders on “unhealthy” for a female, but I could be wrong.
And then I thought “horses for courses”. This was definitely a climber’s parcours and W/Kg is huge in climbing. Would the results have been different with more rolling stages? Perhaps a long ITT (or an ITT at all)? Who knows? Maybe. But I suspect that many of these women are already amenorrheic. I think it would be a tremendous disservice for DSs (or the media/public) to start pressuring them to become even thinner.
I would hope that teams would be thinking about long-term health as well as short-term results, and balance accordingly. Dropping weight as part of peaking might make sense for one or two key events, but is not sustainable.
On the other hand, one could argue that the athletes are being paid to take risks with their health – descending at 80kph, sprinting in packs, eating tons of sugar – and this is just another one. The problem is that most riders don’t have the clout to say “no” in their negotiatons, and there are a dozen waiting for their spot if they walk away.
I think we do need to acknowledge and openly discuss the fact that there are tradeoffs between health and performance. Athletes should understand the consequences and have good data to help with decisions. Nobody should be pressured or coerced into losing weight beyond a healthy level. We’re just emerging from the days when amenhorrea was thought to be a normal sign of good fitness for women, and we don’t want to go back there.
…and here is why it continues to be odd. Nobody suggests Jonas Vingegaard give interviews about his body shape and how he balanced health and performance when he wins one of the biggest sporting events on the planet. There’s some double standards in play and whilst there’s some recent history of bad teams, it still feels odd that media articles about the PFP’s win have a LOT of mentions about her weight.
There absolutely is a double standard. I think one difference may be that while a lot of men would like to ride like Jonas, they don’t want to look like him. Cue the “sickly prince” memes. He doesn’t fit the Western masculine ideal. PFP, on the other hand, is conventionally attractive and it’s easy to see her being an aspirational target for a lot of women.
Not her fault, and more crap she has to deal with, but it is the current reality.
“Nobody suggests Jonas Vingegaard give interviews about his body shape and how he balanced health and performance when he wins”
I don’t know about that. There has been some chatter about Jonas. His wife brought up the team pushing him too hard before the TdF (in ways that encompass more than just body composition). And there are casual “sickly boy king” comments about him of the type that Pogacar doesn’t get. Vingegaard is a very private person, so I’m not sure he’s going to open up about it all anytime soon. But the perception is out there that he might be pushing the limits of what’s healthy.
I mentioned this on Discord as well but a lot of the issue is down to course design. This year’s parcours was basically down to setting as big a time gap as one could on a single very steep HC climb, the Madeleine. In that context, yes weight is very important for performance. But we can imagine different years’ Tours where things might have played out differently. If the mountain stage’s mountaintop finishes were a bit shorter or a bit less steep (say, Alpe d’Huez as the culmination of a queen stage rather than the Madeleine) or the race had a time trial where W/CdA plays a big role in eventual time gaps, would it have made sense for PFP to do the weight-loss routine she did? Would that have favored a taller rider like Demi relative to Pauline?
All this is to say, I think PFP made a reasonable choice executed safely given the constraints and incentives of the course design for this year, and she’s done about as well as can reasonably be expected to clarify that she was doing so for a limited time, for specific purposes, and under medical supervision. We can’t place the weight of society’s bad body-image standards on Pauline’s shoulders.
(I don’t speak French and she may have already done so but if Pauline took time when asked about this to discuss that she was heavier for her Roubaix win and that different courses put different demands on different body types, or noted that she’d never outsprint a more muscular rider like Wiebes, those statements might have helped somewhat as well, but again it’s unfair to expect perfection on the PR front)
There is plenty of discussion re: the weight of JV (and even Pog)…..there is a reason he has been referred to as the “Sickly Prince”.
That said, there is a host of other connotations that part of the discussion re: women’s weight and I hope some female members or Abby weigh in on the subject.
Part of the discussion needs to address menstruation, as well. Kudos to EC for their article on it, as well as to Ant McCrossan and Hannah Walker for talking about it in one of the final stages. I think they mentioned that Squiban (?) had not had her period for a number of years, but had regained some weight and her cycle started again .
I’d really like to know the reasoning behind that. If we continue with those kind of articles, we continue to grow the gap between man and woman in professional sport. Which I would believe is very counter productive to what we, men and woman, actually want. The article suggested as some commenters did here as well, that weight is something that’s only discussed for the women. This could not be further from the truth. It’s discussed in cycling full stop and has been since forever. The likes of Ulrich, Eddy…and so forth have been publicly abused for putting on weight. And we continue to look at watts per kilo as metric for success. I am a man and I am very active in the road cycling community. I am in my mid 40s, a father of a little boy and currently stay at home dad. I put on weight, for several reasons. Some of them in my control, some of them not. MY weight is a topic. People comment on it, not in a bad meaning way but they comment….this is road cycling! Every gram shows in lycra. Brands advertise their kit with 1.90m males wearing SMALL kit. Yes we need to stop this but it has nothing to do with men vs women.
Yeah, maybe that is a key element. I do think we need to discuss weight overall, not hide it in a corner. And be especially careful around women’s cycling, but I think a conversation needs to be had.
maybe that leads to changes in the sport that discourages weight optimization (course design?)
Depite any possible need to discuss the issue, it remains fully apparent that some people are just so bad at talking about this topic that hosting a conversation about it becomes impossible in polite circles.
MIddle-aged man here. But I’ve arrived at the conclusion there are differences between men and women when it comes to societal treatment of body appearance and other issues relating to weight. (And I’m the one above who pointed out that Vingegaard indeed gets body appearance comments thrown his way as well).
I’ve arrived at this from my experience coaching men’s and women’s rowing (both lightweight at times), and from reading the accounts of women like Mara Abbott and Emma Pooley.
There is also a ton of commonality between men and women. But I wouldn’t go too far in declaring them exactly the same. There comes a point in any discussion where we middle-aged men should quiet down and listen rather than “explain how it is.”
A few things. One, we cannot ignore the discussion at the systematic level (how these strategies influence the whole populous of female cyclists) vs the individual (PFP in isolation). Two. I don’t think it adds value to compare the women to the men - of course we can - but being extremely underweight can cause bone density concerns and reproductive concerns at a very different level in women than men, so it’s not and apples to apples comparison. Three and lastly, we men, can object all we want (or throw around the word woke) but there absolutely are different conditions/pressures at play for women - the male gaze, patriarchal power structures, misogyny etc. that simply do not exist for men - and again, all at the system vs the individual level.
It’s complicated. It’d be good to hear/encourage more female voices. Extreme weight loss is complicated. It’s complicated for both men and women. It’s far more complicated for women, and especially so when the majority of their bosses/DS’s perhaps unnecessarily are men, and seem open to question/criticize their riders very healthy weight in the public domain.
At the pro level, one can’t escape the physics of w/kg. It is the single best predictor of climbing speed. We can hope that teams see the value in long-term health vs. short-term results, and in protecting their investment in their riders.
I’m actually not so worried about the top-tier teams. They do a lot of testing, stay current on the science, and have coaches, nutritionists, physiologists and chefs all working together. They have the resources to manage weight safely. I’m more concerned about further down the ladder, with teams and riders more desperate for results and lacking the resources to manage weight in a healthy way.
I have no idea what to do about the social pressures to be thin. Men can probably help by calling out jerks who make negative comments about athletes who look like athletes.
Recreational riders? One of the things I like about cycling is the room for a range of body types. There are heavy folks who are slow on the climbs and are locomotives on the downhills and flats, and vice versa. We are what we are.
I’m well into the age range(60+) where losing muscle mass is a health concern. A couple of years ago I decided that I wanted more upper body strength, and have added some upper-body mass. Has it hurt my climbing? Possibly. But I’ve decreased my risk of injury, and can still enjoy a 2,000m+ day on the bike. It just takes a bit longer.
The Shimano “All Bodies on Bikes” video a few years back really made me think about body size and the culture of cycling, especially road cycling. It shouldn’t be just for skinny people.
My view is that pro cyclists should be free to achieve whichever body mass they deem fit. It’s pro sports - there is no easy ‘perfect’ solution that balances people’s ideals of ‘healthiness’ and performance. They are irreconcilably at odds. If you want to win up the Madeleine or similar, you are going to enhance your odds if you achieve a body mass that some members/segments of society may view as not ideal - for other purposes, including ‘social’ acceptance - whatever that is.
It’s like asking if BASE jumpers are setting a good example to broader society. No, they aren’t. Next question.
I’m a middling club racer. People sometimes say to me “oh you’re so healthy”. Then I rattle off all my injuries, broken bones, scars, surgeries, head knocks. It ain’t healthy. It’s fun to chase a goal.
As to the greater focus on women pro cyclists’ weight than men’s. There’s no justification for that. Also simple.